Quotes About Truth

You know the fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of the experience of the person who reads it.

All remembrance of things past is fiction.

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.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Any form of betrayal can be final. Dishonesty can be final. Selling out is final. But you are just talking now. Death is what is really final.

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

Amit az ember leírt, az többé nem sanyargatja.

If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written. Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline.

Every day brings some disappointment. -No, every day brings new and beautiful illusion. But, everything that's not real in one illusion you can chop it off, like cutting with the blade of a razor.

Az ember végigmegy az életén, s mindenféle helyzetrÅ'l azt hiszi, jelent valamit, s végül kiderül, hogy nem.

Yes Tatie, and you and Chink always talking about how to make things true, writing them, and put them rightly and not describe. I remember everything. Sometimes he was right and sometimes you were right. I remember the lights and textures and the shapes you argued about.

Why be puzzled by that? From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?

Don't ever kid yourself with too much dialectics.

Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

was a gunner's mate," said Marty. It was a lie. He had really been a chief yeoman at the time of the mutiny. But he thought now, always, that he had been a gunner's mate. "Ah. I thought you were a first-class yeoman," Karkov said. "I always get my facts wrong. It is the mark of the journalist.

Con not, that thou be not conned.

To understand is to forgive. That's not true. Forgiveness has been exaggerated.

The hardest thing in the world to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings.

I suppose you start to destroy it for fear you will lose it, or that it will take too great a hold on you, or in case it shouldn't be true, but it is not very good to do.

But they went through this fiction every day.

That has nothing to do with the story.

But are there not many fascists in your country? There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the times comes." But you cannot destroy them until they rebel? No, Robert Jordan said. We cannot destroy them. But we can educate the people so that they will fear fascism and recognize it as it appears and combat it.

You go along your whole life and they seem as though they mean something and they always end up not meaning anything.