Joseph Epstein

"Honesty for a writer is rather different from honesty for others. Honesty, outside literature, means not lying, establishing trust through honorable conduct, absolute reliability in personal and professional dealings. In writing, honesty implies something rather different: it implies the accurate, altogether truthful, reporting of feelings, for in literature only the truth is finally persuasive and persuasiveness is at the same the measure of truth. One might think this would be easy enough to do, but it isn't especially when one is under the added pressure of making both the feelings and the reporting of them keenly interesting." ~Joseph Epstein