Quotes About Truth

Lawrence Sanders

I'm inhibited, isolated, haunted, unknown. However, I haven't compromised myself. And although I lie a good deal, it's mostly whimsical. I'm not living a lie, like the vindicator.

What is true is what is true for you. No one has any right to force data on you and command you to believe it or else. If it is not true for you, it isn't true. Think your own way through things, accept what is true for you, discard the rest. There is nothing unhappier than one who tries to live in a chaos of lies.

The bad stuff is easier to believe. You ever notice that?

Love is always right.

The gray, austere old earth renews her youth With dew-lines, sunshine, gossamer, and haze. How still she lies and dreams, and veils the truth, While all is fresh as in the early days!

There is no comfort looking forth nor back, The present gives the lie to all her past.

When the stunned soul can first lift tired eyes On her changed world of ruin, waste, and wrack, Ah, what a pang of aching sharp surprise Brings all sweet memories of the lost past back, With wild, self-pitying grief of one betrayed, Duped in a land of dreams where Truth is dead!

Never trade a secret, you'll always get the short end of the bargain.

I was the British spy who had come out of the woodwork and told it how it really was, and anything I said to the contrary only enforced the myth. And since I was writing for a public hooked on Bond and desperate for the antidote, the myth stuck.

By repetition, each lie becomes an irreversible fact upon which other lies are constructed.

There is a terrible alienation in the ordinary man between what he is being told and what he secretly believes.

The trouble is, when professional spies go out of their way to make a definitive statement about one of their own, the public tends to believe the opposite: which puts us all back where we started.

I prefer drawing to talking. Drawing is faster, and leaves less room for lies.

All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.

Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!

Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust.

Belief is the wound that knowledge heals.

All or nothing at all, the true lover says, and that's the truth of it. My love will never die, he says. He claims eternity. And rightly. How can it die when it's life itself? What do we know of eternity but the glimpse we get of it when we enter in that bond?

What is more arrogant than honesty?

I'd rather get bad news from an honest man than lies from a flatterer.

I'm not a quester or a searcher for the truth. I don't really think there is one answer, so I never went looking for it. My impulse is less questing and more playful. I like trying on ideas and ways of life and religious approaches. I'm just not a good candidate for conversion.

Between thought and spoken word is a gap where intention can enter, the symbol be twisted aside, and the lie come to be.

Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.