Quotes About Truth

Literature is] the best way of telling the truth; it's a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts.

What does the novel do? It tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths.

Every love story is a potential grief story. If not at first, then later. If not for one, then for the other. Sometimes, for both. So why do we constantly aspire to love? because love is the meeting point of truth and magic.

In Jewish folk music, despair is disguised as the dance. And so, truth's disguise was irony.

If I can't be sure of the actual events any more, I can at least be true to the impressions those facts left.

This [...] isn`t something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn`t always the same as what you witnessed.

What could be put up against the noise of time? Only that music which is inside ourselves - the music of our being - which is transformed by some into real music. Which, over the decades, if it is string and true and pure enough to drown out the noise of time, is transformed into the whisper of history.

It's the best way of telling the truth; it's a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts. Beyond that … [it's] delight in, and play with, language; also, a curiously intimate way of communicating with people whom you will never meet.

Look, writers aren't perfect , I want to cry, any more than husbands and wives are perfect. The only unfailing rule is, If they seem so, they can't be.

In love, everything is both true and false; it's the one subject on which it's impossible to say anything absurd.

Truths about writing can be framed before you've published a word; truths about life can be framed only when it's too late to make any difference.

but what you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.

We listen to what people say, we read what they write—that's our evidence, that's our corroboration. But if the face contradicts the speaker's words, we interrogate the face. A shifty look in the eye, a rising blush, the uncontrollable twitch of a face muscle—and then we know. We recognise the hypocrisy or the false claim, and the truth stands evident before us.

I suppose the truth is that, yes, I'm not odd enough not to have done the things I've ended up doing with my life.

He sometimes asked himself a question about life. Which are truer, the happy memories, or the unhappy ones? He decided, eventually, that the question was unanswerable.

Altitude reduces all things to their relative proportions, and to the truth. Cares, remorse, disgust become strangers: How easily indifference, contempt, forgetfulness drop away...and forgiveness descends.

Such was humanity's self-love, Nadar concluded, that most were inevitably disappointed when they finally saw a true image of themselves.

why should we expect our collective memory – which we call history – to be any less fallible than our personal memory?

Well, getting our history wrong is part of being a person.

He never recorded the writer or the source: he didn't want to be bullied by reputation; truth should stand by itself, clear and unsupported.

Though always frank, the novelist was never wholly sincere.

And so, by the end, you have tried soft love and tough love, feelings and reason, truth and lies, promises and threats, hope and stoicism.

The way, the truth and the life. You go on your way through life telling the truth.

This was hopeless. In a novel, Adrian wouldn't just have accepted things as they were put to him. What was the point of having a situation worthy of fiction if the protagonist didn't behave as he would have done in a book? Adrian should have gone snooping, or saved up his pocket money and employed a private detective; perhaps all four of us should have gone off on a Quest to Discover the Truth. Or would that have been less like literature and too much like a kids' story?