Top 100 Quotes About Writing And Truth
#1. I would tell my 14 year old self to never ever, ever put all of your money in one bank account. And love the ones who love you back. You're going to want to quit ... DON'T! Oh, and get everything in writing.
Brandi L. Bates
#2. there are two different ways of writing history: one is to persuade men to virtue and the other is to compel men to truth.
Robert Graves
#3. I would not have understood that the best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined the truth coming, nor that the majesty and the magic of belief and dreams could be a vital part of life and of writing.
Neil Gaiman
#4. Who does not know history's first law to be that an author must not dare to tell anything but the truth? And its second that he must make bold to tell the whole truth? That there must be no suggestion of partiality anywhere in his writings? Nor of malice?
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#6. All of fiction is truthful. What you create is your own truth and no one can take that away or change it.
Walter Dean Myers
#7. I struggled in the beginning. I said I was going to write the truth, so help me God. And I thought I was. I found I couldn't. Nobody can write the absolute truth.
Henry Miller
#8. Writing is a struggle against the silence where words can have a powerful impact in just a split second and change your life forever ...
Lisa Jones
#9. Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.
Rebecca West
#10. You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves in your heart
your stories, visions, memories, songs: your truth, your version of things, in your voice. That is really all you have to offer us, and it's why you were born.
Anne Lamott
#12. The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented.
J.G. Ballard
#13. Buck up, suck up, and admit you fucked up.
Linda Hilton
#14. I believe Jack Smith might have written THE BOOK on writing and revising for publication. Clean, direct, succinct
a book that is full of pure wisdom and truth, but also amazing technical advice.
Virgil Suarez
#15. That's the whole point of writing to me - I put my characters under incredible duress, and from that comes their truth. In a way, I'm using them to try to find my own answers in life.
R.A. Salvatore
#16. I had been a writer all of my life, every waking second, and now that part of my life was over. I suppose the truth was that I had never put myself forward as a writer, I didn't like the idea of the 'professional writer'; I just wanted to write. But that was not how the world worked...
Bonnie Greer
#17. I dedicate this to all those who did not live to tell it. And may they please forgive me for not having seen it all nor remembered it all, for not having divined all of it - from The Gulag Archipelago
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#18. The golden rule would be to write a great, authentic song that is well produced and it will find its home. The audience can feel whether or not the artist is being genuine in their music. It's up to the artist to have the courage to reveal their truth through their songs.
Wendy Starland
#19. Writing has been sewn into my soul and I'm afraid my thoughts have no choice but to be the truth to the story and my hand the connection between the pen and paper. With every word written, my heart finds its beat and inspiration fuels the desire to fulfill this need.
Amber M. Royse
#20. Books and all forms of writing have always been objects of terror to those who seek to suppress the truth.
Wole Soyinka
#21. Write truthfully, write from the heart, and your words will live.
A.D. Posey
#22. Truth is always the first war casualty. The emotional disturbances and distortions in historical writing are greatest in wartime.
Harry Elmer Barnes
#23. When you grow up to be an author and write books, you'll think you're making the books up, but they'll all really be true, somewhere.
Diana Wynne Jones
#24. I am carrying out my plan, so long formulated, of keeping a journal. What I most keenly wish is not to forget that I am writing for myself alone. Thus I shall always tell the truth, I hope, and thus I shall improve myself. These pages will reproach me for my changes of mind.
Eugene Delacroix
#25. Tell me the truth about death. I don't know what it is. We have them, then they are gone but they stay in our minds. Their stories are part of us as long as we live and as long as we tell them or write them down.
Ellen Gilchrist
#26. There's a tradition in war writing that the veteran goes over and sees the truth of war and comes back. And I'm skeptical of that.
Phil Klay
#27. The purpose of writing is both to keep up with life and to run ahead of it. I am little comfort to myself, although I am the only comfort I have, excepting perhaps streets, clouds, the sun, the faces and voices of kids and the aged, and similar accidents of beauty, innocence, truth and loneliness.
William, Saroyan
#28. Writing a biography is a delicate - not a reckless - process, where the end result, if done properly, is simply the truth revealed. This delicate and intricate research process has never before been done for Bob Crane, a man with a story worth telling.
Carol M. Ford
#29. The challenge of writing books for teenagers is walking the fine line between truth and what the publishers, parents, and the more conservative librarians want to hear.
Annette Curtis Klause
#30. Art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction; in particular, the novel.
Eudora Welty
#31. He hung a patient expression on his face, the kind usually seen on people who talked about releasing your anger and surrounding yourself with good feelings while writing off anyone who disagreed with them as unenlightened.
Amy Fecteau
#32. It has forever been thus: So long as men write what they think, then all of the other freedoms - all of them - may remain intact. And it is then that writing becomes a weapon of truth, an article of faith, an act of courage.
Rod Serling
#33. I speak, I speak, and truth at that. Writers are a curious breed: brooding, fickle, alternately loving and hating their work - and each other. You're my friend? Don't pick up that pen!
Chila Woychik
#34. I'm thinking about past events. I'm interested in recall, exact recall, of what was said, who said it and to whom. I want to know the truth, undistorted by time and revision and wishes and regrets.
Dana Spiotta
#35. I love Twitter. It doesn't keep me from writing and I think it's a really convenient scapegoat when the truth is that the real issue is self-control. I am totally fine admitting i have none. I'm not going to blame Twitter for affecting my writing. And also, Twitter doesn't affect my writing.
Roxane Gay
#36. And that's why I've chosen to write these pages as I've written them. For only by stepping into the middle zone, the polychrome edge between truth and untruth, is it tolerable to be here and writing this at all.
Donna Tartt
#37. Without books, everything would have been crooked. Without books, the wisdom in books today would have been fairy and folk tales. Without books the whole truth about life would have been imaginations and a guessing game
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#38. The best stories are like the best burgers: big, juicy, and messy.
A.D. Posey
#39. The process of writing a story isn't about fair. It's about getting to the heart of your story, getting to the truth of it. It transcends ideals of fair and unfair, right and wrong.
Lynn Coady
#40. I never set out to write a book to change women's lives, to change history. It's like, 'Who, me?' Yes, me. I did it. And I'm not that different from other women. Maybe my power and glory was that I could speak my truth as a woman and it was the truth of every woman.
Betty Friedan
#41. When the storyteller tells the truth, she reminds us that human beings are more alike than unalike ... A story is what it's like to be a human being-to be knocked down and to miraculously arise. Each one of us has arisen, awakened. We do rise.
Maya Angelou
#42. I have found that in fiction one is freer to speak the truth, if only because in fiction the truth is not expected or required. You may easily disguise it, so that it is only recognized much later, when the story and the characters have faded into darkness.
Philip Sington
#43. I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness.
John Updike
#44. Someone spoke to me last night,
told me the truth. Just a few words,
but I recognized it.
I knew I should make myself get up,
write it down, but it was late,
and I was exhausted from working
all day in the garden, moving rocks.
Dorianne Laux
#45. What is writing, no matter how lavish the pieces, if it says nothing of the truth, cares little for the heart, and is merely subservient to the pleasure of showing one's brilliance.
Muriel Barbery
#46. Writing fiction is a way of expressing feelings and revealing a certain truth about life, goals, dreams and desires.
Ann Marie Aguilar
#47. I've had a fountain pen surgically implanted in my left index finger to save trouble. My body is tattooed with line upon line of truth, fiction, and a not-always-pleasing mix of the two.
Chila Woychik
#48. All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity, that the dry, shriveled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut.
Anne Bronte
#49. In love there is truth, and in truth there is peace.
A.D. Posey
#50. The best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it. And what is the purpose of existence Here or Yonder but to discover truth and beauty and express it, i.e., share it with others?
Brenda Ueland
#51. Why do I write? I write to entertain my friends and to exasperate our enemies. To unfold the folded lie, to record to truth of our time, and, of course, to promote esthetic bliss.
Edward Abbey
#52. I want women writers to write boldly, wildly, deeply. I want them to feel really liberated to tell the brutal truth, however they see that truth and are moved to tell it.
Julianna Baggott
#53. If you play Mark Twain and he's not funny, you are definitely not playing Mark Twain. That was the biggest challenge, in some ways. Writing and performing jokes that can come out of that brilliant delivery system he constructed: the friendly, avuncular truth-teller.
Val Kilmer
#54. To be a writer and political is a dangerous thing. To be a writer and apolitical is even more dangerous. Art is right, left; in truth, it has only one direction and that is forward.
Chris Campanioni
#55. I started out writing when I was young; stuff about exposing the truth about how people are not what they appear, about how they are much more dysfunctional than they seem. Pulling back the curtain - that felt smart. But as I got older, exposing how frail people can be seems less and less deep.
Mike White
#56. I don't care about truth; I care about art and style and writing and occupying the wall. For me, my writing style is very linked to the fact that it is a work of art on the wall. I had to find a way to write in concise, effective phrases that people standing or walking into a room could read.
Sophie Calle
#57. In an era where Existence is incontestable, Truth is subjective, and Reality is perceived, fiction must mediate between the three.
Henry Martin
#58. The Novelist, afraid his ideas may be foolish, slyly puts them in the mouth of some other fool and reserves the right to disavow them.
Diane Johnson
#59. That kiss was amazing; it had all the passion and longing we had been holding onto for so long. That is when the dam finally broke for me and I started crying. I knew right then that Hunter was the only one I wanted. He was my happily ever after.
Megan Smith
#60. The scholar may be sure that he writes the tougher truth for the calluses on his palms. They give firmness to the sentence. Indeed, the mind never makes a great and successful effort, without a corresponding energy of the body.
Henry David Thoreau
#61. In the Phaedrus, Plato argued that the new arrival of writing would revolutionize culture for the worst. He suggested that it would substitute reminiscence for thought and mechanical learning for the true dialect of the living quest for truth by discourse and conversation.
Marshall McLuhan
#62. A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. It's a lie if you make something up. But you make it up in the name of the truth, and then you give your heart to expressing it clearly.
Anne Lamott
#63. The Journal is not essentially a confession, a story about oneself. It is a Memorial. What does the writer have to remember? Himself, who he is when he is not writing, when he is living his daily life, when he is alive and real, and not dying and without truth.
Maurice Blanchot
#64. I can tell you that the book 'The Ugly Truth' is about puberty and all the awfulness that comes with that time in a person's life. It was definitely some different subject matter to be writing about, especially knowing some of my audience are second and third graders.
Jeff Kinney
#65. Is not anyone with any degree of mental honesty conscious of telling lies all day long, both in talking and writing, simply because lies will fall into artistic shape when truth will not?
George Orwell
#66. Historians desiring to write the actions of men, ought to set down the simple truth, and not say anything for love or hatred; also to choose such an opportunity for writing as it may be lawful to think what they will, and write what they think, which is a rare happiness of the time.
Walter Raleigh
#67. Write drunk (on emotion); edit sober (on rationality and intention).
Faulkner, reimagined by me.
Christina Cooke
#68. He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to.
Stephen King
#69. These pages are not my confession; they're my definition. And I feel, as I begin to write it, that I can write it with some semblance of truth.
Fernando Pessoa
#70. The things that make you a functional citizen in society - manners, discretion, cordiality - don't necessarily make you a good writer. Writing needs raw truth, wants your suffering and darkness on the table, revels in a cutting mind that takes no prisoners ...
Natalie Goldberg
#71. Semi-facetiously, when people ask me why I write these kinds of stories, I simply say that I was warped as a child. And, there is some truth to that.
Stephen King
#72. I don't think there's any topic a writer should feel afraid of tackling just because it has already been discussed. If you feel you have a fresh perspective and an understanding of a certain emotional truth, it's always worth writing.
Jami Attenberg
#73. Truth is often better seized and louder in the silence of the written word.
Ina Catrinescu
#74. There are times when I myself no longer know whether I said and did the things I report or whether I dreamed them up. Anyway, I always dream true. If I lie a bit now and then it is mainly in the interest of truth.
Henry Miller
#75. The conqueror writes history, they came, they conquered and they write. You don't expect the people who came to invade us to tell the truth about us ...
Miriam Makeba
#76. I've been told by people who write historical novels that you just sort of write the emotional truth first, the story at the core, and then you go back and research it at the end.
Jami Attenberg
#77. Writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little.
Anne Lamott
#78. While you're governing the colony and I'm writing political philosophy, They'll never guess that in the darkness of night we sneak into each other's room and play checkers and have pillow fights.
Orson Scott Card
#79. I want people who write to crash or dive below the surface, where life is so cold and confusing and hard to see.
Your anger and damage and grief are the way to the truth.
Anne Lamott
#80. The truth, or success, of any writer's story lies partly in its specificity and its emotional honesty.
Gail Caldwell
#81. I wrote. Something. Yes.
And you were truthful.
No.
You weren't truthful?
I was accurate.
Richard Flanagan
#82. An exquisite invention this, Worthy of Love's most honeyed kiss,
This art of writing billet-doux
In buds, and odors, and bright hues! In saying all one feels and thinks In clever daffodils and pinks; In puns of tulips; and in phrases, Charming for their truth, of daisies.
Leigh Hunt
#83. I made myself a rule: write out of love. And when you love somebody, you have to tell the truth about who they are - not the cute "truth" in your head of who they are, the one where you did everything right and they did everything wrong.
Leigh Newman
#84. The existence of the writer is to write, and to write is to tell the truth.
Azar Nafisi
#85. Not all writing is political or revolutionary, but the very act of giving yourself permission to write, to speak, to share the truth no matter whether the truth you understand is the truth others want to acknowledge, is brave, powerful, and important.
Dinty W. Moore
#86. The truth is that I can't remember a moment when I didn't want to be a writer. From childhood, I loved books, I loved stories and I loved writing my own
John Boyne
#87. Write and people will come to read. Write and people will heed to your words and share them with others. Not all may relate, but wait, and those that were meant to see it eventually will find it, for truth waits to be found. It searches for no one.
Suzy Kassem
#88. Everybody is original, if he tells the truth, if he speaks from himself. But it must be from his *true* self and not from the self he thinks he *should* be.
Brenda Ueland
#89. We all gotta die, and we all gotta live with the things our dark sides do. People are afraid of their darkness, though. Spend their whole lives so scared of dyin' that they never get to live. Spend their whole lives pushin' down that darkness, until there ain't no light at all.
Suzanne Palmieri
#90. I try to write every day. Sometimes the things come out well, and sometimes they don't. When they come out well you think, Wow, I must be really great; and when they come out poorly, you think you must be terrible, but the truth is that's how any process works.
Richard Ayoade
#91. The poet will write for his peers alone. He will remember only that he saw truth and beauty from his position, and expect the time when a vision as broad shall overlook the same field as freely.
Henry David Thoreau
#92. People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves.
Harold Bloom
#93. I've really been writing a lot of country songs. I used to get criticized for doing a 'Bump & Grind,' then turning around and doing a gospel song. But the truth is I'm glad I have a gift that allows me to switch lanes.
R. Kelly
#94. Poetry aims for an economy of truth - loose and useless words bust be discarded, and I found that these loose and useless words were not separate from loose and useless thoughts. Poetry was not simply the transcription of notions - beautiful writing rarely is.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#95. If newspapers were written by people whose sole object in writing was to tell the truth about politics and the truth about art we should not believe in war, and we should believe in art.
Virginia Woolf
#96. When you have nothing left to lose, it's easy to dive deep into those deep, dark hidden places and write your truth. I'm there.
Lori Lesko
#97. Have the courage to walk in truth, the strength to love always, and the integrity to never stray away from doing so.
A.D. Posey
#98. When I write I don't aim to shock people, and I'm surprised when I do. But I don't think that anything that occurs in life should be omitted from art, though the artist should present it in a fashion that is artistic and not ugly. I set out to tell the truth. And sometimes the truth is shocking.
Tennessee Williams
#99. I became a feminist activist propelled in part by outrage and despair, and a stubborn determination to shape a life, and create a literature, that was not a lie.
Dorothy Allison
#100. To subvert is not the aim of literature, its value lies in discovering and revealing what is rarely known, little known, thought to be known but in fact not very well known of the truth of the human world. It would seem that truth is the unassailable and most basic quality of literature.
Gao Xingjian
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