Stephen King on truth and lies

Get busy living, or get busy dying.

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them⁠—words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy…and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know.

John Keats1795–1821Ode on a Grecian Urn, Stanza 5. The final lines of this poem have been rendered in various ways in different editions, some placing the entire last two lines within quotation marks, others only the statement “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” …In context

• Beauty

This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.

William Shakespeare1564–1616Hamlet (1600–1), Act I, scene iii.In context

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

Winston Churchill1874–1965