Quotes About Truth

One writes out of one thing only—one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

Artists are the only people in a society who will tell that society the truth about itself.

Let us say, then, that truth, as used here, is meant to imply a devotion to the human being, his freedom and fulfillment; freedom which cannot be legislated, fulfillment which cannot be charted.

On the contrary, we have a very deep-seated distrust of real intellectual effort (probably because we suspect that it will destroy, as I hope it does, that myth of America to which we cling so desperately).

The crime of which you discover slowly you are guilty is not so much that you are aware, which is bad enough, but that other people see that you are and cannot bear to watch it, because it testifies to the fact that they are not.

but what men imagine they are doing and what they are doing in fact are rarely the same thing.

It's very hard to live with that,' said Eric. 'I mean, with the sense that one is never what one seems—never—and yet, what one seems to be is probably, in some sense, almost exactly what one is.

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up. All of it, the literal and the fanciful.

There were so many things one did not dare to know. And were they all patiently waiting, like demons in the dark, to spring from hiding, to reveal themselves, on some rainy Sunday morning?

Truth: for the dream of safety dies hard.

This has everything to do, of course, with the nature of that dream and with the fact that we Americans, of whatever color, do not dare examine it and are far from having made it a reality.

The blacks have a song which says, 'I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.' No American film, relating to blacks, can possibly incorporate this observation.

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster. The

The effort not to know what one knows is the most corrupting effort one can make—

To find out, to find out, you keep saying, as though we were accomplices in a crime. We have not committed any crime.

In order to change a situation one has first to see it for what it is.

I mean, I think you've got to be truthful about the life you have. Otherwise, there's no possibility of achieving the life you want.

For the horrors of the American Negro's life there has been almost no language.... And, in fact, the truth about the black man, as a historical entity and as a human being, has been hidden from him, deliberately and cruelly; the power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.

I was in a box for I could see that, no matter how I turned, the hour of confession was upon me and could scarcely be averted; unless of course, I leaped out of the cab, which would be the most terrible confession of all.

The time has come, God knows, for us to examine ourselves, but we can only do this if we are willing to free ourselves of the myth of America and try to find out what is really happening here.

All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there.

The poets, by which I mean all artists, are finally the only people that know the truth about us. Soldiers don't, statesmen don't, priests don't, union leaders don't…only the poets.

Take no one's word for anything, including mine—but trust your experience. Know whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go.

We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.