William Faulkner Quotes

There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.

A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

Artists are people who are not at all interested in the facts - only in the truth.

Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.

It's a very complicated issue about when is a fact not a fact in the context of opinions.

The facts are always less than what really happened.

There is a distinction between fact and truth. Truth has an element of revelation about it. If something is true, it does more than strike one as merely being so.

Don't confuse facts with reality.

All good art, to me, is uncertainty.

I don't have a great respect for reality or getting the 'facts' as a means of putting together a story.

What is truth? Truth doesn't really exist. Who is going to judge whether my experience of an incident is more valid than yours? No one can be trusted to be the judge of that.

That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were truths and they were all beautiful.

I often wish... that I could rid the world of the tyranny of facts. What are facts but compromises? A fact merely marks the point where we have agreed to let investigation cease.

Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty.

Facts are not the truth. They only indicate where the truth may lie.

The truth is more important than the facts

There are three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth.

For 'Frost/Nixon,' everyone I spoke to told the story their way. Even people in the room tell different versions. There's no one truth about what happened in those interviews, so I feel very relaxed about bringing my imagination to the piece. God knows everyone else has.

I think what happens is when we start to look at the facts, everybody has their impression of what truth is.

The great philosophers are poets who believe in the reality of their poems.

Art must take reality by surprise. It takes those moments which are for us merely a moment, plus a moment, plus another moment, and arbitrarily transforms them into a special series of moments held together by a major emotion.

Truth is only a question of point of view.

The facts, even the real ones, must be imagined before they can be stated.

The truth isn't just the facts. You can have all the facts imaginable and miss the truth, just as you can have facts missing or some wrong, and reach the larger truth.

The fact is one thing and the idea about the fact is another.