The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented. It's a vast, sentimentalizing structure that reassures the reader, and at every point, offers the comfort of secure moral frameworks and recognizable characters. This whole notion was advanced by Mary McCarthy and many others years ago, that the main function of the novel was to carry out a kind of moral criticism of life. But the writer has no business making moral judgments or trying to set himself up as a one-man or one-woman magistrate's court. I think it's far better, as Burroughs did and I've tried to do in my small way, to tell the truth.

Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth.

Blind respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

Quelle atroce invention que celle du bourgeois, n'est-ce pas?

Facts are the enemy of truth.

What a horrible invention, the bourgeois, don't you think? (22 September 1846)

Facts, my dear Sancho, are the enemy of truth.

Contemporary literature, in each and every epoch, is the worst enemy of culture. A reader's limited time is wasted in reading a thousand books that blunt his critical sense and damage his literary sensibility.

Privacy is a bourgeois fantasy.

Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth,

Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth

Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.

A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.