Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses.

A home without books is a body without soul.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

The first stories I wrote when I was 12 were about Mars and landing on Mars.

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

A lot of people are afraid to tell the truth, to say no. That’s where toughness comes into play. Toughness is not being a bully. It’s having backbone.

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.

Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

And all who told it added something new, and all who heard it, made enlargements too.

Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.

I never liked Hans Christian Andersen because I knew he was always getting at me.

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

Truth, according to the Christian faith, is God’s love for us in Jesus Christ. Therefore, truth is a relationship.

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

The object of the superior man is truth.

I rewrote the ending to ‚Farewell to Arms,‘ the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.

If anything, I get most upset because I wanna read a good paper first thing in the morning. And if I see a lie about myself flash across the front of the cover, I don’t think much of the rest of the newspaper.

Most of my short stories are fantasy.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

If you ever injected truth into politics you have no politics.

The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.

The truest form of any form of revolutionary Left, whatever you want to call it, was Jack Kerouac, E.E. Cummings, & Ginsberg’s period. Excuse me, but that’s where it was at.

Yes, across Europe, this wall will fall. For it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.

It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.

I like being a writer.

Do not go gentle into that good night but rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have Immortal longings in me.

Every writer has his writing technique – what he can and can’t do to describe something like war or history. I’m not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.

He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.

I hoped to be able to write a novel which would enable me to live on it while I wrote the next.

There is another old poet whose name I do not now remember who said, ‚Truth is the daughter of Time.‘

There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.

Nothing is more noble, nothing more venerable than fidelity. Faithfulness and truth are the most sacred excellences and endowments of the human mind.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

My favourite poem is the one that starts ‚Thirty days hath September‘ because it actually tells you something.

Every day, my mom and I would watch a different Judy Garland VHS. I love how she tells a story when she sings. It was just about her voice and the words she was singing – no strings attached or silly hair or costumes, just a woman singing her heart out. I feel like that doesn’t happen that much anymore.

How far that little candle throws its beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

If I am judged for my work, many myths about me as an autocrat or otherwise would become clearer. I feel false propaganda will not last, and truth will ultimately prevail.

To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!

Miss a meal if you have to, but don’t miss a book.

A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.

New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.

Part of the reason there’s an injunction to the truth, for example, is that if you’re in a circumstance of extreme uncertainty, your best weapon, let’s say, or your best tool or your best defense is the truth, because it keeps things simpler.

I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.

I never see thy face but I think upon hell-fire.

The stories are not autobiographical, but they’re personal in that way. I seem to know only the things that I’ve learned. Probably some things through observation, but what I feel I know surely is personal.

Of course, there are those critics – New York critics as a rule – who say, ‚Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer.‘ Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.

I just do the best I can and write something interesting, to tell stories in an interesting way and move forward from there.

My mind doesn’t work, my memories don’t work like a computer file where I can just retrieve them and, boy, there it is. My mind is selective in terms of memories. When I try to think back to college or high school, there are gaps. I try to fill them in. But I can’t tell you it’s always the truth.

We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.

It’s not easy to define poetry.

What I see, what I went through, what a friend of mine may have went through, whatever – I rap about it.

It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

I love a good Dorothy L. Sayers.

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

The secret of being a bore… is to tell everything.

The thing about the truth is, not a lot of people can handle it.

So foul and fair a day I have not seen.

Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain’t goin‘ away.