Of course it’s the same old story. Truth usually is the same old story.

Stories lie deep in our souls. Stories lie so deep at the bottom of our hearts that they can bring people together on the deepest level. When I write a novel, I go into such depths.

Faith: not wanting to know what is true.

It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

I know now that there is no one thing that is true – it is all true.

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

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.

The funny thing is that I feel close to all my characters. Deep, deep inside them all.

With action films, it’s great if it’s not just driven by action, but by a good story and interesting characters, as well. Though, there’s nothin‘ like kicking butt!

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.

Truth is a pathless land.

A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true.

I promised myself that I would write as well as I can, tell the truth, not to tell everything I know, but to make sure that everything I tell is true, as I understand it. And to use the eloquence which my language affords me.

Music helps me tell my story. That’s where I can really be heard. But there’s so much focus on the things that aren’t music.

The object of the superior man is truth.

Love is the answer to everything. It’s the only reason to do anything. If you don’t write stories you love, you’ll never make it. If you don’t write stories that other people love, you’ll never make it.

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

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

I have suffered most of the things I write about – or my friends have.

It is the nature of truth in general, as of some ores in particular, to be richest when most superficial.

Nothing fortifies scepticism more than the fact that there are some who are not sceptics; if all were so, they would be wrong.

Falsehood is cowardice, the truth courage.

If you can’t read, the only thing you can do is enjoy the pictures, not the whole story. Reading is the key to knowledge. Knowledge is the key to understanding. So read on, young man! Read on, young lady!

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

Half a truth is better than no politics.

The truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects.

‚For Whom the Bell Tolls‘ was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

At school I pretended I had a normal life, but I felt lonely all the time and different from everyone else. I never felt like I fit in, and I wasn’t allowed to participate in after-school activities, go to sports events or parties or date boys. Many times I had to make up stories about why I couldn’t do anything with my classmates.

God is, even though the whole world deny him. Truth stands, even if there be no public support. It is self-sustained.

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

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

Knowledge is true opinion.

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

A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.

Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn’t a rule about this. But there’s a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.

I could hardly sit through ‚Frozen.‘ There was an attempt to craft a moral message and to build the story around that, instead of building the story and letting the moral message emerge. It was the subjugation of art to propaganda, in my estimation.

Maybe stories are just data with a soul.

A writer of fiction is really… a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

I like being a writer.

Every hero becomes a bore at last.

Truth is weirder than any fiction I’ve seen.

Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.

Be not astonished at new ideas; for it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many.

Every picture has its own demands, and every picture stimulates something within you to tell it a certain way. I don’t know what that is; I don’t think too much about that.

If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.

Justice is truth in action.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.

The Joker that Christopher Nolan created in ‚The Dark Knight‘ had the scar across his mouth, and the first time you heard his explanation for it, he makes you believe that’s how he got it. But then you get into the film, and every time he talks about his scar, it’s a totally different story.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

An example I often use to illustrate the reality of vanity, is this: look at the peacock; it’s beautiful if you look at it from the front. But if you look at it from behind, you discover the truth… Whoever gives in to such self-absorbed vanity has huge misery hiding inside them.

No legacy is so rich as honesty.

It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.

I don’t know the law, the kind of law of quantity and quality, but I think the opportunity of people being able to express themselves and to have the means of production is a great thing. It’s also changing how we’re telling stories.

I love Los Angeles, and it’s been very good to me, but if everyone is running around telling the stories, who’s living them? You don’t play characters that are celebrities – you play guys who know what to do when their septic tank’s blocked.

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

I went into the business for the money, and the art grew out of it. If people are disillusioned by that remark, I can’t help it. It’s the truth.

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.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.