Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. 
It was in that room too that I learned not to think about anything that I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day. That way my subconscious would be working on it and at the same time I would be listening to other people and noticing everything, I hoped; learning, I hoped; and I would read so that I would not think about my work and make myself impotent to do it.
- Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

I believe that it is a writer’s duty to speak the truth, especially unpopular truth. Especially truth that offends the powerful. It is writer’s obligation, I believe, to be a critic of the society he lives in. If the independent freelance writer will not speak the truth to us and for us, then who will? Do we get the truth from politicians? Do we get the truth from  Chambers of Commerce? Do we get the truth from the bureaucrats of government? From the Cattlemen’s Association? From Time or Newsweek or CBS or ABC or NBC? Do we get the truth from the TV evangelists of commercial religion? Do we even get much truth from science and scientists?
      Well, we get some. But not enough. It seems to me that the majority of scientists are specialized technicians. Most of them long ago sold their souls to commerce, to industry, to government, or war. Therefore, I repeat, it is the writer’s duty to speak truth –- you notice I carefully don’t attempt to describe or define truth, however offensive that truth may sometimes be.
    I’m going to quote Tolstoy here. In one of his earlier books, Tolstoy said, “The hero of my work, in all his unadorned glory and beauty, is truth.”
   Truth is always the enemy of power. And power is always the enemy, at least the potential enemy –- of truth. Writers who shirk from telling the truth, who simply go with the flow, who pander, for example, to those East Coast literati (my dead enemies) . . . Writers who do that are merely hacks.
     Hemingway once said it, and said it good, in respect to power, governmental power: “A writer is like a gypsy. He owes no allegiance to any government. If he’s a good writer, he will never like any government he lives under. His hands should be against it, and its hand will always be against him.” This from a letter that probably got him into all kinds of trouble. He probably died in some labor camp.
      - Edward Abbey, Something about Mac, Cows, Poker, Ranchers, Cowboys, Sex and Power. . . And Almost Nothing About American Lit, as published in Northern Lights.

I once interviewed artist Frederick Franck, artist and author of Zen and the Art of Seeing among other books. He gave me a pamphlet he had written about Pacem in Terris, the sculpture gardens he and his wife Claske created. The gardens, he said, are “a sacred place that speaks to the sacred space at the core of the human heart.” In the pamphlet I came across this quote:

Art is not a luxury! Art arises from one’s depths or it is not art but kitsch! Art, for me, is and was my digging tool for Meaning, for Truth . . . my own truth that may speak to your truth. Art then becomes a “religious,” a spiritual act, not in any sectarian sense but as a witness to a “religious” attitude to sheer being, to existence as such, being Supremely Meaningful.