Truth Quotes

When you don’t know what to believe, when you’re not prepared to play the amateur detective, then you get tired and dismiss the entire business, you let it go, you stop thinking and wash your hands of the truth or of the whole tangled mess—which comes to the same thing. The truth is never clear, it’s always a tangled mess. Even when you get to the bottom of it. But in real life almost no one needs to find the truth or devote himself to investigating anything, that only happens in puerile novels.

~ Javier Marías

Everything becomes a story and ends up drifting about in the same sphere, and then it's hard to differentiate between what really happened and what is pure invention. Everything becomes a narrative and sounds fictitious even if it's true.

~ Javier Marías

Stories are just lies made to look like truth.

~ Johnny Rich

All you need do, Bernie,”she gulped her toast soaked in coffee, “is present the truth as fiction.

~ James Purdy

I think the best fiction is about the absolute irrepressibility of love in the face of every circumstance to the contrary. Even in someone as dark, on the face of it, as Faulkner often is, there is that unquenchable glimmer....Grace will ever find a way. I don't think fiction has to be hokey, or end up hitting you on the head with positivity, to be life affirming. I think all we have to do is go on down to the bottom of the truth and hang out there in the dark for a bit, with nowhere to go but up, and grace will find a way.

~ Tim Farrington

Beautiful untrue things are even more beautiful when they're true.

~ Marty Rubin

All of fiction is truthful. What you create is your own truth and no one can take that away or change it.

~ Walter Dean Myers

Sin says, Do you think that people get married with aspirations to divorce? Do you think that people try drugs with the motive to be addicted? No. It is not merely the act that you see taking place, but it is I that has taken their minds captive. I have played the lobes of their minds like the strings on a harp; soothing them and making them feel, see, and hear the images that they desire in their innermost being.

~ Stephen And Tiffany Domena

There is no truth, only science and fiction.

~ Steven Brewis

A novel, though fiction, often speaks to the largest truths.

~ Mark Rubinstein

Fictional people are people, too, otherwise why would we care what happens to them?

~ Nora Roberts

It was always this way: The more people talked, the more they obscured. You didn't need to argue for the truth. You could see it.

~ Max Barry

As every reader knows in his or her heart, there is much more to truth than mere fact.

~ Alison Croggon

Truth in her dress finds facts too tight. In fiction she moves with ease.

~ Rabindranath Tagore

As I pen these words to leave a lasting record, I wonder myself where it all began.

~ Richard Peck

That’s what fiction is for. It’s for getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient for the truth.

~ Tim O’brien

I have found that in fiction one is freer to speak the truth, if only because in fiction the truth is not expected or required. You may easily disguise it, so that it is only recognized much later, when the story and the characters have faded into darkness.

~ Philip Sington

Ô, wine!, the truth-serum so potent that all those who wish to live happy lives should abstain from drinking it entirely!... except of course when they are alone.

~ Roman Payne

Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.

~ Norman Mailer

Why are you so anxious to destroy in the name of a vulgar, commonplace sense of truth, this reality which comes to birth attracted and formed by the magic of the stage itself, which has indeed more right to live here than you, since it is much truer than you -- if you don't mind my saying so?

~ Luigi Pirandello

There may always be another reality to make fiction of the truth we think we've arrived at.

~ Christopher Fry

Since truth is often stranger than fiction, fiction needs to be pretty weird.

~ Erik Meyer

You can't make a fan of everyone. Stay true to your story, characters, music, art or whatever it is you do and fuck everyone else who doesn't like it. Life isn't perfect.

~ Ann Marie Frohoff

Now, then, that is the tale. Some of it is true.

~ Mark Twain

Without stories, we’d have even more trouble recognizing what’s real.

~ Amy Neftzger

Fiction is Truth's elder sister. Obviously. No one in the world knew what truth was till some one had told a story.

~ Rudyard Kipling

I look at the human sciences as poetic sciences in which there is no objectivity, and I see film as not being objective, and cinema verite as a cinema of lies that depends on the art of telling yourself lies. If you’re a good storyteller then the lie is more true than reality, and if you’re a bad one, the truth is worse than a half lie.

~ Jean Rouch

Man may deceive his fellow-men, deception may follow deception, and the children of the wicked one may have power to seduce the foolish and untaught, till naught but fiction feeds the many, and the fruit of falsehood carries in its current the giddy to the grave; but one touch with the finger of his love, yes, one ray of glory from the upper world, or one word from the mouth of the Savior, from the bosom of eternity, strikes it all into insignificance, and blots it forever from the mind. (Messenger and Advocate Oct 1934 pp 14-16)

~ Oliver Cowdery

it's through the simple things in life, through its games, when our minds mature the most and we grow knowledgeable. It's also when the cloth masks of our outer, false personalities are torn asunder, and we are able to see every last blemish of a man's genuine character that they hide beneath... no matter how dark or obscene it may be.

~ Evan Meekins

Love is not measured by acts or years, but by truth between two people.

~ Evan Meekins

The pursuit of truth, not of facts, is the business of fiction.

~ Oakley Hall

For a split second I wonder what I am doing here on this battlefield, on the front line. I am a princess. I am soft and regal. I am quiet, forgotten Sorrowlynn, who never leaves her rooms. And yet I am so much more. I have the capacity to be anything. To be everything! This girl running to fight for the greater good is me. For the first time ever, I feel like I am living the life I was meant to be living all along.

~ Bethany Wiggins

I became a feminist activist propelled in part by outrage and despair, and a stubborn determination to shape a life, and create a literature, that was not a lie.

~ Dorothy Allison

The truth, 'stop violence against women' is a truth that is flawed, because it ignores the many forms of abuses of women, and then totally ignores men, children and the unborn.Why the unborn ? Well today, more and more unborn women of tomorrow are having their heart-beats terminated today, because they are female.

~ Caesar J. B. Squitti

Practically every mental health care practitioner, from the most erudite psychoanalysts to untrained self-help gurus, tell us that it is infinitely more fulfilling and we are all saner if we tell the truth, yet most of us are not rushing to stand up and be counted among the truth tellers. Indeed, as someone committed to being honest in daily life I experience the constant drag of being seen as a 'freak,' for telling the truth, even when I speak truthfully about simple matters. If a friend gives me a gift and asks me to tell him or her whether I like it, I will respond honestly and judiciously; that is to say I will speak the truth in a positive, caring manner. Yet even in this situation, the person who asks for honesty will often express annoyance when given a truthful response.

~ Bell Hooks

The enormous difference between fighting gender discrimination as opposed to race discrimination is good people immediately perceive race discrimination as evil and intolerable. But when I talked about sex-based discrimination, I got the response, 'What are you talking about? Women are treated ever so much better than men!

~ Ruth Bader Ginsburg

I'm not sure how we got to this place, where a girl's only value is in what kind of marriage she has, how capable she is of keeping a man happy.

~ Amy Engel

Feminists often pretend to be angry and offended in order to win debates or, I should say, prevent debates from ever happening. If you can act angry and offended, especially on a college campus, you can shut down the other side using a speech code.

~ Mike Adams

If a woman defined herself solely by the man she was with—and vice versa—the world would be a very shallow and insipid place, indeed.

~ Nenia Campbell

In oppressing, one becomes oppressed. Men are enchained by reason of their very sovereignty; it is because they alone earn money that their wives demand checks, it is because they alone engage in a business or profession that their wives require them to be successful, it is because they alone embody transcendence that their wives wish to rob them of it by taking charge...

~ Simone De Beauvoir