Truth rings no bells.

Conversation succeeds conversation, Until there's nothing left to talk about Except truth, the perennial monologue, And no talker to dispute it but itself.

we shall know that we have begun to speak true by an increased hunger for true-speaking; we shall have the whole hunger only after we have given ourselves the first taste of it.

Emile Saint-Blague had been a lively, versatile painter in his youth, but he had abused his energy by painting too many pictures; so that in what might have been the ripe period of his art he had nothing left but ideas. A man who has nothing left but ideas may be of great service to his friends, but he is of no use at all to himself. Emile was certainly an inspiration to his friends.

Ideas are the old-age of art. Artists have to keep young; they must not think too much - thought is death, while art is life. Such was Emile's viewpoint.

When ... I comprehended that poetry had no provision in it for ultimate practical attainment of the rightness of work that is truth, but led on ever only to a temporizing less- than-truth ... I stopped.

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.