Quotes About Honesty

I'm not unfaithful, darling. I've plenty of faults but I'm very faithful. You'll be sick of me I'll be so faithful.

Keep right on lying to me. That's what I want you to do.

You won't do our things with another girl, or say the same things, will you?

Then there is the other secret. There isn't any symbolysm [sic]. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.

No subject is terrible if the story is true, if the prose is clean and honest, and if it affirms courage and grace under pressure.

I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together

And you treat me wonderfully and keep all your promises.

World War I was the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied, So the writers either wrote propaganda, shut up, or fought.

Imagination? It is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more he can imagine.

don't ask me a lot of questions if you don't like the answers

Every one needs to talk to some one, the woman said. Before we had religion and other nonsense. Now for every one there should be some one to whom one can speak frankly, for all the valor that one could have one becomes very alone.

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.

I never trust frank and simple people whose stories hold together.

If he lived by a lie he should try to die by it

To show his nervousness was not shameful; only to admit it.

Imagination] is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more he can imagine. If he gets so he can imagine truly enough people will think that the things he relates all really happened and that he is just reporting.

Lie life through its fullest

You know I'm no squealer, Harry.' 'You're a rummy. But no matter how rum dumb you get, if you ever talk about that, I promise you.' 'I'm a good man,' he said. 'You oughtn't to talk to me like that.' 'They can't make it fast enough to keep you a good man,' I told him. But I didn't worry about him any more because who was going to believe him?

It was not so much that he lied as that there was no truth to tell.

The hardest thing in the world to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn...

The author must write what he has to say, not speak it.

Tell me everything at once.

Write the truest sentence you know. Then write another. -- Hemingway's advice to other young writers in A Moveable Feast.

You know. Don't pretend you don't know.