Quotes About Truth

Long ago I decided that at a political meeting the truth usually comes out in just such a speech or a remark ignored at the time because its tone is not that of the meeting. Humorous, or satirical, or even angry or bitter — yet it's the truth, and all the long speeches and contributions are nonsense.

Di quali ricordi ci possiamo fidare? Basta solo pensarci di sfuggita per accorgersi che i ricordi sono sicuri quanto una bolla di sapone.

I am simply asking myself: Why a story at all—not that it was a bad story, or untrue, or that it debased anything. Why not, simply, the truth?

I have to conclude that fiction is better at "the truth" than a factual record. Why this should be so is a very large subject and one I don't begin to understand. DORIS LESSING

That's the point—anything might be true anywhere, there's never any way of really knowing the truth about anything. Anything is possible—everything's so crazy, anything at all's possible.

Ch? có má»™t tá»™i lá»—i th?t sá»± và ??y là tá»± thuy?t ph?c mình r?ng Ä'i?u t?t nhì là Ä'i?u t?t nh?t.

Obviously, my changing everything into fiction is simply a means of concealing something from myself.

Los viejos saben por experiencia que a veces los recuerdos se alteran y el sentido cambia

It is, I think, almost a law that what one is afraid to say because it will be rejected by the atmosphere of a time, will turn out to be a few years later the most important thing of all.

The truth was, she was becoming more and more uncomfortably conscious not only that the things she said, and a good many of the things she thought, had been taken down off a rack and put on, but that what she really felt was something else again.

As soon as one has lived through something, it falls into a pattern. And the pattern of an affair, even one that has lasted five years and has been as close as a marriage, is seen in terms of what ends it. That is why all this is untrue. Because while living through something one doesn't think like that at all.

In times of war, as everyone knows who has lived through one, or talked to soldiers when they are allowing themselves to remember the truth, and not the sentimentalities with which we all shield ourselves from the horrors of which we re capable --- in times of war we revert, as a species, to the past and are permitted to be brutal and cruel. It is for this reason, and of course others, that a great many people enjoy war. But this is one of the facts about war that is not often talked about.

fiction is the great lie that tells the truth

We all nourish truth with our tongues not in sour-batter words that never take shape nor line-driven stories bent to skirt the edge of our great exhaustion, desire, and doubt. We all use simply the words of our own lives to say what we really want, to lie spent on our lovers, put teeth to all we hate, to strain the juice of our history between what has been allowed and what has always been denied, the active desire to take hold of the root.

Every writing course I ever heard of said the same thing. Take one story, follow it through, beginning, middle, end. I don't do that. I never do. Behind the story I tell is the one I don't. Behind the story you hear is the one I wish I could make you hear.

People want biography. People want memoir. They want you to tell them that the story you're telling them is true. The thing I'm telling you is true, but it did not always happen to me.

Books can offer a counter narrative—another story to the one we think we know.

Let me tell you a story. I tell stories to prove I was meant to survive, knowing it is not true.

There is a difference between fiction and nonfiction deeper than technique or intention. I value both but genuinely believe that fiction can tell a larger truth.

No lies, I thought, but lots of stories. True stories. True lies. Powerful stories, heroic tales, and cautionary fables.

fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies into meaning.?

The things you hesitate to talk about," Bertha repeated in her husky North Carolina accent, "those are the things you should be writing about.

Deux ou trois choses dont je suis sûre, et l'une d'entre elles est que raconter l'histoire jusqu'au bout est un acte d'amour

As I was finishing the copyediting of Bastard, I found myself thinking about all I had read when Kate Millett published Flying: her stated conviction that telling the truth was what feminist writers were supposed to do. That telling the truth—your side of it anyway, knowing that there were truths other than your own—was a moral act, a courageous act, an act of rebellion that would encourage other such acts.