A Quote by Susan Sontag

The writer's first job is not to have opinions but to tell the truth... and refuse to be an accomplice of lies and misinformation. Literature is the house of nuance and contrariness against the voices of simplification.

Susan Sontag

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Accomplice Against First First Job House Job Lies Literature Misinformation Nuance Opinions Refuse Simplification Tell Truth Voices Writer

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Susan Sontag
American - Author
January 16, 1933 - December 28, 2004

I do believe that is a template that I stick very strongly to to tell the truth in an increasing swelter of lies and misinformation and disinformation.

Christiane Amanpour

Truth is the first thing that present-day literature lacks. The writer has drowned himself in lies, he is too accustomed to speak prudently, with a careful look over his shoulder.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

The Kafka paradox: art depends on truth, but truth, being indivisable, cannot know itself: to tell the truth is to lie. thus the writer is the truth, and yet when he speakes he lies.

Franz Kafka

One task of literature is to formulate questions and construct counterstatements to the reigning pieties. And even when art is not oppositional, the arts gravitate toward contrariness. Literature is dialogue: responsiveness. Literature might be described as the history of human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures evolve and interact with one another.

Susan Sontag

We have to uphold a free press and freedom of speech - because, in the end, lies and misinformation are no match for the truth.

Barack Obama

A writer's job is to tell the truth.

Andy Rooney

The writer's job is to tell the truth.

Ernest Hemingway

[Literature is] a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts.

Julian Barnes

It's very difficult to measure the impact on policy of any investigative journalism. You hope it matters to let a little more truth loose in the world, but you can't always be sure it does. You do it because there's a story to be told. I can tell you that the job of trying to tell the truth about people whose job it is to hide the truth is about as complicated and difficult as trying to hide it in the first place.

Bill Moyers

Your first obligation as a writer is to tell the truth and to tell a good story.

Lena Waithe

Often the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth.

Mark Twain

I can tell you that the job of trying to tell the truth about people whose job it is to hide the truth is about as complicated and difficult as trying to hide it in the first place.

Bill Moyers

Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.

Paul Auster

To subvert is not the aim of literature, its value lies in discovering and revealing what is rarely known, little known, thought to be known but in fact not very well known of the truth of the human world. It would seem that truth is the unassailable and most basic quality of literature.

Gao Xingjian

Let our lives be firmly rooted in Truth. Abstain from lies. In this dark age of materialism, adherence to truth is the greatest austerity. We might have to tell lies now and then to protect somebody or to sustain dharma, but we must be careful not to speak lies for our own selfish purposes.

Mata Amritanandamayi

Throughout African-American literature, the writer has, in a sense, been burdened by the necessity of pleading the case for the whole race. For example, writers of slave narratives tend to lose their individual voices, as they were expected to stand in for all other voices, which were absent.

Glenn Ligon

A Quote by Susan Sontag

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