I've always preferred mythology to history. History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality.
We take what's shown on television as the truth, and it isn't. News isn't even the truth on television. If you look up the definition of what news is, it isn't that what we're watching on the new - it's entertainment.
Do not believe the truth. The truth is tiny compared to what you have to do.
If you tell a novelist, 'Life's not like that', he has to do something about it. The poet simply replies, 'No, but I am.'
Perception and reality are two different things.
The thinking of the one, therefore, will be determined by eternal truth, the actions of the other more by the practical reality of the moment. The greatness of the one lies in the absolute abstract soundness of his idea.
It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.
My great longing is to make those very incorrectnesses, those deviations, remodellings, changes in reality, so that they may become, yes, lies if you like - but truer than the literal truth.
I ain't interested in the truth. I'm interested in the way things should be.
I make a distinction between true and real. I think that the story is true, it’s just not real. That’s what a parable is. It takes things that we all know are real, and it takes life events that actually happens, and it weaves them into a fiction that allows truth to actually be embedded.
Or -- and this she knew was a far more accurate way of looking at it -- the book was true and reality was lying.
As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.
Reality is self-defined as the mob, any mob, writes its own history, never to be contradicted by the quiet statement of truth.
The whole point to American journalism is what ought to be true is true.
The majority of photographers focus on the obvious. They believe and accept what their eyes tell them, and yet eyes know nothing.
There is everything you know and there is everything that happens. When the two do not line up, you make a choice.
The most striking difference between ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality.
