Orson Scott Card Quotes

Never believe anything a writer tells you about himself. A man comes to believe in the end the lies he tells himself about himself.

You don't know what people are looking for. What you know is what you feel like might be missing. It's up to the people to agree with you or disagree with you, and you'll know in their reaction.

Nobody knows what another person is thinking. They may imagine they do, but they are nearly always wrong.

When those closest to us respond to events differently than we do, when they seem to see the same scene as part of a different play, when they say things that we could not imagine saying in the same circumstances, the ground on which we stand seems to tremble and our footing is suddenly unsure.

A letter is a risky thing; the writer gambles on the reader's frame of mind.

Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it isn't so.

All of us... when we think we are talking most intimately to someone else, are actually addressing an image we have of the person to whom we believe we speak.

It was possible, maybe, to have facts in your mind that weren't facts at all. You could build a whole life's story on false assumptions. You could make truths out of untruths and untruths out of truths. Until you spoke them, really said them out loud or checked for sure, you may not have known which were which.

Whatever you say it is, it isn't.

I have a problem when people say something's real or not real, or normal or abnormal. The meaning of those words for me is very personal and subjective. I've always been confused and never had a clearcut understanding of the meaning of those kinds of words.

Autobiography is probably the most respectable form of lying.

What we don't understand we can make mean anything.

It really doesn't matter if it happened exactly how I say it happened.

The way we remember people, even their beauty is all so subjective and a matter of perspective.

People tell stories and it's up to those who listen whether to believe or not." "Shouldn't the storyteller believe it." "The storyteller should tell it.

Between what I think, what I want to say, what I believe I say, what I say, what you want to hear, what you believe to hear, what you hear, what you want to understand, what you think you understand, what you understand...They are ten possibilities that we might have some problem communicating. But let's try anyway...

To achieve accurate knowledge of others, if such a thing were possible, we could only ever arrive at it through the slow and unsure recognition of our own initial optical inaccuracies. However, such knowledge is not possible: for, while our vision of others is being adjusted, they, who are not made of mere brute matter, are also changing; we think we have managed to see them more clearly, but they shift; and when we believe we have them fully in focus, it is merely our older images of them that we have clarified, but which are themselves already out of date.

Yes, one uses what one knows, but autobiography means something else. I should never be able to write a real autobiography; I always end by falsifying and fictionalizing—I’m a liar, in fact. That means I’m a novelist, after all. I write about what I know.

There are always four sides to a story: your side, their side, the truth and what really happened.

When you hear a true story, there is a part of you that responds to it regardless of art, regardless of evidence. Let it be the most obvious fabrication and you will still believe whatever truth is in it, because you can not deny truth no matter how shabbily it is dressed.

You can never be sure whether you are discovering the truth or inventing it.

I tell myself that I know you, and then when I think about it, I realize that I don't.

It hadn't even occured to me that somebody would believe mine.

Our stories about our own lives are a form of fiction, I began to see and become more insistent as we grow older, even as we try to make them come out in some other way.

I cannot assume you will understand me. It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear. Some story we must have. Stray words on crumpled paper. A weak signal into the outer space of each other. The probability of seperate worlds meeting is very small. The lure is immense. We send starships. We fall in love