Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Quotes

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand.

Whenever a great painter... does a work which appears to be false and lying, that falsity is very 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.

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

They said, 'You have a blue guitar, / You do not play things as they are.' / The man replied, 'Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.'

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

When I look at a body it gives me choice of what to put in a painting, what will suit me and what won't. 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.

Art is not truth; art is the lie which makes us see the truth.

There can be no literary equivalent to truth.

Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it's about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel.

I think no artist can claim to have any access to the truth, or an authentic version of an event. But obviously they have slightly better means at their disposal because they have their art to energize whatever it is they're trying to write about. They have music.

Music tells no truths.

Theatre critics have no special access to the truth. And there should be no objective truth to art.

Artists are the gatekeepers of truth.

I'm not that interested in recreating reality. I'm interested in recreating an emotional truth.

The writer concerned more with technique than truth becomes a technician, not an artist.

If nothing will finally survive of life besides what artists report of it, we have no right to report what we know to be lies.

If artists do see fields blue they are deranged, and should go to an asylum. If they only pretend to see them blue, they are criminals and should go to prison.

The place for truth is not in the facts of a novel; it is in the feelings.

Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.

Art- speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day and that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth. The truth lives from day to day, and the marvelous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh today.

There's this crazy thinking that style guarantees truth. You go out with a hand-held camera, use available light, and somehow the truth emerges.

For me with art and all that stuff - I like abstraction. I like contortion. I mean, it's still truth. But it's truth through the center of the individual. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's fallacies or falsehoods. It just happens to be one perception of what's happening.

What matters is the imaginative truth.

Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth.