Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.

You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.

Some people focus more on sonics. Some people focus more on story. I focus on both sonics and story.

On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.

A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her work of fiction.

Lies are sufficient to breed opinion, and opinion brings on substance.

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

The object is very clear in the fight against racism; you have reasons why you’re opposed to it. But when you’re writing a novel, you don’t want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that.

My childhood did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.

Time discovers truth.

The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.

Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now – always.

I was once a journalist. And I think of myself as a journalist, and that’s it. You tell the truth. I even wrote a book called ‚The Truth‘.

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday life.

I can tell you all kinds of moral tales, but fashion and reality are vaguely different.

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.

I wouldn’t put myself forward to do a film like ‚Changeling‘ if I thought I couldn’t pull people into a story because of all the other ways people see me.

Seeing is not always believing.

Truth is weirder than any fiction I’ve seen.

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

The great quest of life has always been to discover truth.

My own books drive themselves. I know roughly where a book is going to end, but essentially the story develops under my fingers. It’s just a matter of joining the dots.

Plato is my friend; Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.

The truth. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and must therefore be treated with great caution.

They’ve got this crazy actor who’s 82 years old up there in a suit. I was a mayor, and they’re probably thinking I know how to give a speech, but even when I was mayor I never gave speeches. I gave talks.

Not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, does the enlightened man dislike to wade into its waters.

I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful: they are found because it was possible to find them.

For me, the world that I inhabit in reality is probably a very different world than the one people expect that I would be in.

The truth is lived, not taught.

I now possess the tools as a producer and a songwriter to really just go out and make smashes all day long. I could make an album full of smash records that got pop appeal. But my heart is in hip-hop. My heart is in telling stories. And it’s like therapy for me.

It is a no-fail, incontrovertible reality: If you get, give. If you learn, teach. You can’t do anything with that except do it.

Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.

A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.

Let the future tell the truth, and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments. The present is theirs; the future, for which I have really worked, is mine.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

If we hope for what we are not likely to possess, we act and think in vain, and make life a greater dream and shadow than it really is.

So near is falsehood to truth that a wise man would do well not to trust himself on the narrow edge.

Digital technology allows us a much larger scope to tell stories that were pretty much the grounds of the literary media.

The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.

Falsehood is cowardice, the truth courage.

All truth is simple… is that not doubly a lie?

Forgive me my nonsense, as I also forgive the nonsense of those that think they talk sense.

Tell the children the truth.

No one can be happy who has been thrust outside the pale of truth. And there are two ways that one can be removed from this realm: by lying, or by being lied to.

Rastafari not a culture, it’s a reality.

You know those things that you throw the twigs into and it spits them out? That’s what I do. The branches are like life, and I throw them into my head and some of it comes out as humor.

Young people are just as attracted to the truth as they are convenience and expediency.

Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.

For me, ‚risky‘ is revealing what really happened in my life through music. Risky is writing confessional songs and telling the true story about a person with enough details so everyone knows who that person is.

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

Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed.

Appearance is something absolute, but reality is not that way – everything is interdependent, not absolute. So that view is very helpful to maintain a peace of mind because the main destroyer of a peaceful mind is anger.

Two qualities are indispensable: first, an intellect that, even in the darkest hour, retains some glimmerings of the inner light which leads to truth; and second, the courage to follow this faint light wherever it may lead.

There can be no better grounding for a lifetime as an author than to see humanity in all its various guises through the lens of the reporter for the town.

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

The foolish man conceives the idea of ‚self.‘ The wise man sees there is no ground on which to build the idea of ‚self;‘ thus, he has a right conception of the world and well concludes that all compounds amassed by sorrow will be dissolved again, but the truth will remain.

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!

I’m interested in two things. I’m interested in truth and I’m interested in fairness.

I was bold in the pursuit of knowledge, never fearing to follow truth and reason to whatever results they led, and bearding every authority which stood in their way.