Edwidge Danticat Quotes

When I write nonfiction, it's always absolutely true. There will be no moment in my nonfiction where I have made something up and have to apologize to the bullying hostess of a talk show.

Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by flashlight beneath a blanket, they had no real existence in our world. They were like seeds in the beak of a bird, waiting to fall to earth, or the notes of a song laid out on a sheet, yearning for an instrument to bring their music into being.

The real importance of reading is that it creates an ease & intimacy with the process of writing... It also offers you a constantly growing knowledge of what has been done and what hasn't, what is trite and what is fresh, what works and what lies there dying (or dead) on the page. The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.

But maybe half a lie is worse than a real lie.

All men who read escape from something else into what lies behind the printed page; the quality of the dream may be argued, but its release has become a functional necessity.

Of all the things that make for happiness, the love of books comes first. No matter how the world may have used us, sure solace lies there.

I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully.

I think it's because I'm real. Inside and outside of the ring, what you see is what you get. I'm CM Punk. I'm not trying to be something I'm not. I'm not trying to lie to the people or be fake. I'm not trying to be some crazy, outlandish character. I'm real and they appreciate that. Everything I say, it comes from the heart. It's all real.

It's very rare that you get a part that you actually like. People have a misconception, whether it be because actors lie or because you're reading interviews from giantly, massively famous actors, but you don't just get offered parts, all the time. You actually have to work to get them.

Knowledge is the stuff from which new ideas are made. Thus, the real key to being creative lies in what you do with your knowledge.

The only real security in life lies in relishing life's insecurity.

Even if I believed there was a real Jesus, I wouldn't fall for that line of hogwash. The "Virgin" Mary should get a posthumous medal for telling the biggest goddamn lie that was ever told. Anybody who believes that will believe that the moon is made out of green cheese.

Fiction and nonfiction are not so easily divided. Fiction may not be real, but it's true; it goes beyond the garland of facts to get to emotional and psychological truths. As for nonfiction, for history, it may be real, but its truth is slippery, hard to access, with no fixed meaning bolted to it. If history doesn't become story, it dies to everyone except the historian.

When you're just reading a note card but when you're just reading a note card and it doesn't even feel real, it's difficult at times. But I have no problem doing interviews. So I have absolutely no problem doing interviews.

They like to tell us that it is important to speak the truth, but it has been my experience that real happiness lies in having people tell you what you want to believe, usually not the same thing at all, and if you have to stub your toe on the truth later, so be it.

Things rarely happen for a single reason. Even the cleverest and most skilled manipulators recognize that their real art lies in making use of that which they cannot predict.

The World is not enough used to this way of writing, to the moment. It knows not that in the minutiae lie often the unfoldings ofthe Story, as well as of the heart; and judges of an action undecided, as if it were absolutely decided.

What a dazzlingly generous, gloriously unpredictable book! Maggie Nelson shows us what it means to be real, offering a way of thinking that is as challenging as it is liberating. She invites us to 'pay homage to the transitive' and enjoy 'a becoming in which one never becomes.' Reading The Argonauts made me happier and freer.

In my dream, it was the tongue of what is, and anything spoken in it becomes real, because nothing said in that language can be a lie. It is the most basic building brick of everything.

Trump has not masked who he is. Trump has not behaved like the Democrats do. He does not go out and camouflage. He doesn't present a side of him that isn't real. He doesn't lie to people about what he believes. Although he has broken a serious promise. And he's got some immigration people that voted for him that are a little angry about that. That must be mentioned. But other than that, Trump voters know Trump is who he is. He doesn't act, he doesn't put on a front, he doesn't make up things - as opposed to the Democrats who can't be honest about who they are.

A writer writes a book. People read it. You don't know what they're reading, really. You read a review and think, "That is so inaccurate. You can't have been reading my book with any kind of attention, because that is all wrong, that's even the wrong name you're including there." But these reviewers have been diminished in importance, the work is so little respected. If you're reviewed by a real critic, by James Wood or Louis Menand, then you get something that is informed, interesting, and highly articulate. But the average review doesn't have that kind of depth anymore.

Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.

Real reading is a lonely activity.

There is something evocative about the idea of destruction. This act of destruction is the expression of an idea... that what we call reality is not real at all. When I draw a head, for example, I immediately feel an urge to destroy it, to erase it, because the drawing only captures an outward appearance, and for me the vital issue is what lies behind the visual form of the head.

To me, truth is the big thing. Constantly you're writing something and you get to a place where your characters could go this way or that and I just can't lie. The characters have gotta be true to themselves.