Quote #3

If what you write is true, it will not be so because of what you are as a writer but because of what you are as a being. There can be no literary equivalent to truth. If, in writing, truth is the quality of what is said, told, this is not a literary achievement: it is a simple human achievement.

More from Laura Riding

  1. Forgive me, giver, if I destroy the gift. It is so nearly what would please me I cannot but perfect it.
  2. Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth. Poetic art cheats truth to further and finer degrees than art o…
  3. There is a sense of life so real that it becomes the sense of something more real than life:It is the meaning at work in what has no meanin…
  4. To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth:but only a problem of art is solved in poetry.

All Laura Riding quotes