Padgett Powell Quotes

I stepped on a land mine named Jayson Blair.

Frankly, no newspaper is set up to monitor for cheats and fabricators.

A great many political speeches are literary parricides; they kill their fathers.

Be very, very careful not to let the facts get mixed up with the truth.

Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect.

It takes one minute to tell a lie, and an hour to refute it.

All I could think of was that the teachers must've found the illegal stash of candy I'd been selling out of my dorms room. Or maybe they'd realized I got my Essay on Tom Sawyer from the Internet without ever reading the book and now they were going to take away my grade. Or worse, they were going to make me read the book.

I didn't want to write another book about fraudulence.

You may imitate, but never counterfeit.

Study's overrated. Just find someone smart to copy off. -Adrian to Lissa

Senator John Kyle claiming that over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does is abortion. Stephen Colbert: Over 90 percent, that is unbelievable...in that it is not true. Only 3 percent of what Planned Parenthood does is abortion. Kyle just rounded it up to the nearest 90.

Bob [Dylan] is not authentic at all. He's a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception. We are like night and day, he and I.

Unlike statements of fact, which require no further work on our part, lies must be continually protected from collisions with reality.

I will not be quoting Hemingway anytime soon, nor will I ever read another one of his books. And if he were still alive, I would write him a letter right now and threaten to strangle him dead with my bare hands just for being so glum. No wonder he put a gun to his head, like it says in the introductory essay.

The little honesty that exists among authors is discernible in the unconscionable way they misquote from the writings of others.

Well you can't believe everything you read. After all, by definition, fiction writers lie for a living.

This isn't the old days where you can just say stuff and people will believe it.

Literature is by definition opinionated. It is bound to provoke the arguments in many quarters, not excluding the hometown or even the family of the author.

Few of those who fill the world with books, have any pretensions to the hope either of pleasing or instructing. They have often no other task than to lay two books before them, out of which they compile a third, without any new material of their own, and with very little application of judgment to those which former authors have supplied.

Virginia Woolf was one example. She was called the "Lover of 100 Gangsters."

There's this American pretense, which is the pretense of the journalist with the view from nowhere - which has somehow morphed into the journalist who was born this morning. So, he doesn't know that Donald Trump lied yesterday, and the day before. So, he concludes that he doesn't know whether Trump lied accidentally or on purpose. You can only pretend not to know that if you don't know that he lied yesterday, and the day before. So, to my mind when NPR says they don't know if he's intentionally lying, they're lying. We have to be smarter about it.

When "news stories" are broken, do we not expect a certain amount of fact-checking or source-checking? One has to ask if this falls under the guise of sloppy reporting or deception as a source of spin. We seem to accept a certain amount of deception and we seem to be helpless to doing anything about it, as illustrated so clearly by where we are right now in this moment in history.

There is no rest stop on the misinformation highway.

A lie can make it half way around the world before the truth has time to put its boots on.

Folks will say anything, and next time round they'll believe it.