The writer's responsibility: Tell the truth
If you forget everything else you ever knew about writing, remember this:
By taking up the study of writing now, you are assuming consciously, probably for the first time in your lives, a responsibility for our language. What is that responsibility? I think it is to make words mean what they say. It is to keep our language capable of telling the truth. […]
The first obligation of a writer is to tell the truth—or to come as near to telling it as is humanly possible.—Wendell Berry
(With thanks to Alice Linsley.)
Roy Jacobsen
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