Serge Schmemann Quotes

A lie is profanity. A lie is the worst thing in the world. Art is the ability to tell the truth.

Trust is built on telling the truth, not telling people what they want to hear.

Why do we not hear the truth? Because we do not speak it.

Truth and ceremony are two things.

And that's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.

Nobody actually looks like what they really are on the inside.

Life's so much easier when you're not always maintaining two worlds: the one formed of lies, which feels real, and the one you live in, which often feels like lies. So easy to get them confused.

That's the beauty of it. Have you seen the contraptions these magicians build to accomplish the most mundane feats? They are a bunch of fish covered in feathers trying to convince the public they can fly, I am simply a bird in their midst.

We must look for consistency. Where there is a want of it we must suspect deception.

I'll pretend that I want you for what is on the inside.

In matters of honesty, there are no shortcuts; no little white lies, or big black lies, only the simple, honest truth spoken in total candor... Being true is different than being honest.

Sincerity is a certain openness of heart. It is to be found in very few, and what we commonly look upon to be so is only a cunningsort of dissimulation, to insinuate ourselves into the confidence of others.

Any sort of plain speaking is better than the nauseous sham good fellowship our democratic public men get up for shop use.

Truth can be really powerful stuff if you're not expecting it.

Man is bound to lie about himself

Man can certainly keep on lying (and does so), but he cannot make truth falsehood.

Ridicule has followed the vestiges of truth, but never usurped her place.

Falsehood, like a drawing in perspective, will not bear to be examined in every point of view, because it is a good imitation of truth, as a perspective is of the reality, only in one. But truth, like that reality of which the perspective is the representation, will bear to be scrutinized in all points of view, and though examined under every situation, is one and the same.

Trying to be witty leads to lying, more or less.

I am unlikely to trust a sentence that comes easily.

The best men are the least suspicious of fraudulent purposes.

I am not a cheat and never have been.

Nobody can make a monkey out of anyone who isn't a monkey to start with.

To copy the truth can be a good thing, but to invent the truth is better, much better.

For me, film-making is combining images and sounds of real things in an order that makes them effective. What I disapprove of is photographing things that are not real. Sets and actors are not real.