You see a [painting] you like because you admire the spirit of it, and you say to yourself, yes, that is a fine invention. Then later, perhaps even years later, you find yourself watching a person, a scene, an object, which might have been the origin of the painting you admired, and suddenly you realize that it wasn’t invention at all but truth that the work was based on. And this realization is always, for me anyway, very moving. Because it emphasizes all the originality, courage, effort that lay behind the presenting of that truth which looked like an invention. It is like listening to a story-teller because he tells good stories and then suddenly realizing that he is talking about his own life, about himself in the third person.

∆ John Berger, A Painter of Our Time: A Novel