"Cheever, or, The Ambiguities" (p. 244)
American Fictions (1999)
“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.”
Source: A Moveable Feast (1964), Ch. 2
Context: I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know."
“Lawyers spend their professional careers shoveling smoke.”
Attributed in Watergate and the White House, Volumes 1-2 (1973) by Edward W. Knappman, p. 100; this has also become paraphrased as "Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke".
Attributions
Source: Beyond This Horizon (1948; originally serialized in 1942), Chapter 14, “—and beat him when he sneezes”, p. 131
“Philosophy is properly Home-sickness; the wish to be everywhere at home.”
Philosophie ist eigentlich Heimweh - Trieb überall zu Hause zu sein.
Novalis (1829)
Variant: Philosophy is really nostalgia, the desire to be at home.
Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 49
Quoted by Diogenes Laërtius
“Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.”
These words, which have been widely attributed to Scalia, do not appear in any of his writings or statements. http://www.snopes.com/scalia-death-penalty-quote He nonetheless remarked in Herrera v. Collins (1993, concurring) that state courts had no obligation to review a death sentence on factual innocence grounds, an opinion that he repeated in In re Davis (2009, dissenting).
Misattributed
“It may justly be urged that, properly speaking, what alone has meaning is a sentence.”
Source: Philosophical Papers (1979), p. 56.
“When lawyers take what they would give
And doctors give what they would take.”
Latterday Warnings; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
