Quotes on Telling The Truth

This is what I do know: A lie, however well-intended, can't prepare you for reality or change the world... To tell the truth is to provide armament against a world too full of cruelties to be defeated with simple falsehoods... It seems to me we owe the world--more, we owe ourselves--the exchange of comfort for the chance that maybe the truth can do what people always say it can. The truth may, given the opportunity, set us free.

Tell the truth. If you tell the truth all the time you don't have to worry three months down the line about what you said three months earlier. Truth is always the truth. You won't have to complicate your life by trying to cover up.

Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.

To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that's political, in its most profound way.

Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.

Tall and straight I may appear, but I will always be Ada inside. A crooked little person trying to tell the truth. The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes

All I could say was, "I don't know what to do." I remember her taking me by the shoulders and looking me in the eye with a calm smile and saying simply, "Tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth.

I am simply impressed by the unexpected insights which shower down on me when my job is to imagine, as contrasted with the woodenly familiar ideas which clutter my desk when my job is to tell the truth.

a writer must always tell the truth (unless he's a journalist)

The man in black smiled. "Shall we tell the truth then, you and I? No more lies?" I thought we had been." But the man in black persisted as if Roland hadn't spoken. "Shall there be truth between us, as two men? Not as friends, but as equals? There is an offer you will get rarely, Roland. Only equals speak the truth, that's my thought on't. Friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of regard. How tiresome!

When one of us tells the truth, he makes it easier for all of us to open our hearts to our pain and that of others.

Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself.

Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else.

Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.

Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.

I don't want realism. I'll tell you what I want. Magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don't tell the truth. I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it!

The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out.

its no surprise to me that anyone hardly tells the truth about how they feel. The smart ones keep to themselves for good reason. Why would you want to tell anyone anything that's dear to you? Even when you like them and want nothing more than to be closer to them? It's so painful to be next to someone you feel so strongly about and know you can't say the things you want to.

In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.