Source: The American Presidency
“A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.”
Смятам, че ролята и на журналиста, и на писателя е критичният анализ. Разбира се и писателят, и журналистът плащат съответната цена.
Програма Хоризонт, https://bnr.bg/post/101200075, Bulgarian National Radio, December 2019
“Sometimes you have to lie. But to yourself you must always tell the truth.”
Source: Harriet the Spy
Homage to Catalonia (1938)
Context: The fat Russian agent was cornering all the foreign refugees in turn and explaining plausibly that this whole affair was an Anarchist plot. I watched him with some interest, for it was the first time that I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies — unless one counts journalists.
James Burgh, in The Dignity of Human Nature (1754)
Misattributed
"The Shadowland of Dreams"', published in Chicken Soup for the Soul at Work (1996) by Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Maida Rogerson, Martin Rutte and Tim Clauss; also in Alex Haley : The Man Who Traced America's Roots (2007), a collection of stories and essays by Haley published in Reader's Digest between 1954 to 1991.
Context: Many a young person tells me he wants to be a writer. I always encourage such people, but I also explain that there’s a big difference between “being a writer” and writing. In most cases these individuals are dreaming of wealth and fame, not the long hours alone at the typewriter. “You’ve got to want to write,” I say to them, “not want to be a writer.”
The reality is that writing is a lonely, private and poor-paying affair. For every writer kissed by fortune, there are thousands more whose longing is never requited. Even those who succeed often know long periods of neglect and poverty. I did.
