“A poet can only write about what is true to his own experience, not about what he would like to be true to his experience.”

— Stephen Spender

Foreword
The Still Centre (1939)
Context: A poet can only write about what is true to his own experience, not about what he would like to be true to his experience.
Poetry does not state truth, it states the conditions within which something felt is true. Even while he is writing about the little portion of reality which is part of his experience, the poet may be conscious of a different reality outside. His problem is to relate the small truth to the sense of a wider, perhaps theoretically known, truth outside his experience.

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Stephen Spender 76

English poet and man of letters 1909–1995

Barry Long (1926–2003) Australian spiritual teacher and writer

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)
Context: You think: you become that thought. And consciousness, or the state of pure awareness, is lost. The highest knowledge man can possess is that which is true in his own experience. If his experience is limited, so is his knowledge and he behaves accordingly.

“I pray, in short, that God exists, that Lucifer brings about His own Redemption and that mankind therefore shall in time be free of them both forever: for until Man makes his own justice according to his own experience, he will never know what true peace can be.”

Michael Moorcock book The War Hound and the World's Pain

Source: The War Hound and the World's Pain (1981), Chapter 18 (p. 168)

“When one has a religious experience, what is “true” is only that one has had that experience, not that its contents convey anything about reality.”

Jerry Coyne book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 195

“To believe what another says about you is unconscious, robot thinking. Nothing is true in self-discovery unless it is true in your own experience. This is the only protection against the robot levels of the mind.”

Barry Long (1926–2003) Australian spiritual teacher and writer

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

“I do not think writers ought ever to sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme… If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.”

Doris Lessing (1919–2013) British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer

"Literature Nobel Awarded to Writer Doris Lessing" http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15195588 All Things Considered NPR (11 October 2007)