Top 100 Quotes About Writing The Truth
#1. You thought I was writing The Truth? Honey, I don't even know what The Truth means.
Hugh Elliot
#2. Write to exhaustion so that you can no longer manage to avoid writing the truth.
Elissa Schappell
#3. 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
#4. Writing is mostly a case of mood management. The emotion you have is not absolute, it is temporary. It may be useful, but it is not the truth. It is not you.
Anne Enright
#5. I will take any liberty I want with facts as long as I don't trespass on the truth ... We confuse facts with truth.
Farley Mowat
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. Truth is often better seized and louder in the silence of the written word.
Ina Catrinescu
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. The story unfolded quickly as I typed, in a way I was becoming familiar with. There was something about putting the truth on paper, bringing facts into the light of day where everyone could look at them, that made my fingers move faster -- it was becoming one of my favorite sensations on earth.
Gwenda Bond
#12. The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth.
Criss Jami
#14. 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
#15. Writing is my shelter. I don't hide behind the words; I use them to dig inside my heart to find the truth.
Terry McMillan
#16. "Best in the world," "lowest price in existence, " etc are at best claiming the expected. But superlative of that sort are usually damaging. They suggestion looseness of expression, a tendency to exaggerate, a careless truth. They lead readers to discount all the statements that you make
Claude C. Hopkins
#17. One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up.
Arthur Koestler
#18. Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.
Franz Kafka
#19. I am not ultimately interested in writing fiction. I can't make things up. Or rather, I can only make things up about things that have already happened.
Alison Bechdel
#20. 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
#22. Not many people were speaking truth to power in the '80s. I had a really good time doing it - I found it gratifying. It was a joy to have an opportunity to say what you believed. It's challenging to do it in fiction, but I liked writing the novels. I liked writing 'Democracy' particularly.
Joan Didion
#23. 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
#24. When you invent something, you're drawing on reservoirs of knowledge that you already have. It's only when you're faithful to the truth that something can come to you from the outside.
Elif Batuman
#25. Write drunk (on emotion); edit sober (on rationality and intention).
Faulkner, reimagined by me.
Christina Cooke
#26. When you start putting pen to paper, you see a side of your personal truth that doesn't otherwise reveal itself in conversation or thought.
Anthony Kiedis
#27. I am simply impressed by the unexpected insights which shower down on me when my job is to imagine, as contrasted with the woodenly familiar ideas which clutter my desk when my job is to tell the truth.
Kurt Vonnegut
#28. 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
#29. 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
#31. 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
#32. I am not writing to flatter paternal egotism, to echo cant, or prop up humbug; I am merely telling the truth.
Charlotte Bronte
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. The writer does not dare dream of giving the best of his individuality. No, he must never express his anger. The vacillating demands of mediocrity must be satisfied. Amuse the people, be their clown, give them platitudes about which they can laugh, shadows of truth which they can hold as truths.
Aleksandar Hemon
#37. This is not necessarily the answer people want, but ultimately, I think writing is an amoral process. Your ultimate responsibility is to the truth of the story you're trying to tell.
Lynn Coady
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. When we've decided to tell the truth in a story, we should tell good, strong versions of it, proper versions that kids can do something with.
Celine Kiernan
#41. 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
#43. 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
#45. Storytelling is the art of unfolding knowledge in a way that makes each piece contribute to a larger truth.
Philip Gerard
#46. In an era where Existence is incontestable, Truth is subjective, and Reality is perceived, fiction must mediate between the three.
Henry Martin
#47. 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
#48. It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Bevore you can write anything, you have to notice something.
John Irving
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. As a writer of philosophy, it's good to ask oneself, 'Will I still believe this a week from now, or months, or even years?
Criss Jami
#53. People believe in everything except the reality.
Min Kim
#54. The first law for the historian is that he shall never dare utter an untruth. The second is that he shall suppress nothing that is true. Moreover, there shall be no suspicion of partiality in his writing, or of malice.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. The worst service, I fancy, that anyone can do for truth, is to set silly people writing on its behalf.
George Eliot
#59. If you get bored with nothing to do, you are not a writer ... We are in the business of reproducing reality from nothing. We are the biggest liars in the world, seeking truth.
Guillermo Del Toro
#60. People don't remember lessons. They remember stories.
Kamand Kojouri
#61. Truth gets buried, that's why people write autobiographies.
Elia Kazan
#62. Beware the faces that bare the most smiles.
For they are the ones who hide the most sadness - .
A.R. Von
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. Never be afraid to write what you believe. If the message speaks the truth, others will fear your words for you.
Rob Bignell, Editor
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.
Susan Sontag
#71. 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
#73. Doubt: How can I know? Truth: How can you not?
A.D. Posey
#74. Conditioning was something I always shied away from, now I've learnt that training never stops.
Mark Donnelly
#75. You take people, you put them on a journey, you give them peril, you find out who they really are.
Joss Whedon
#76. 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
#77. I personally feel the most vulnerable when I write. That's where I learned to tell the truth when I was young.
Jewel
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. Write,' she said, 'as if you'll never be read. That way you'll be sure to tell the truth.
Lori Lansens
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. I'm nothing. Nothing at all without writing. Without truth, my truth, the only truth I know, it's all a gambol in the pasture without rhythm or sense.
Harlan Ellison
#84. We were all journalists, professional truth-seekers, but one thing we knew about the truth that laymen were prone to disregard was that it need not be literal or factual; the unpredictable human personality was itself a fact.
Walter Kirn
#85. 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
#86. At last I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had.
Brenda Ueland
#87. What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.
Jacques Derrida
#88. Superior poets say what they really feel. Mediocre poets say what they decide to feel. Inferior poets say what they think they should feel.
Alvaro De Campos
#89. 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
#90. 82/ The truth is that writing is simply not reliable. You can't count on it to be there just because you've made time for it. In fact, making space might make it disappear.
Kim Addonizio
#91. The first accepted piece of writing is the most exciting. No other publishing experience matches it. Perhaps jaundice sets in, or expectations are raised, or one starts to think that one is better than is the truth.
David Bergen
#92. 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
#93. Since truth is often stranger than fiction, fiction needs to be pretty weird.
Erik Meyer
#94. Learning to write is not a linear process. There is no logical A-to-B-to-C way to become a good writer. One neat truth about writing cannot answer it all. There are many truths. To do writing practice means to deal ultimately with your whole life.
Natalie Goldberg
#97. 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
#98. When writing about oneself, one must strive to be truthful. Truth is more important than modesty.
Roald Dahl
#99. Poets find truth by writing about what they love.
Susan Cooper
#100. At the age of fourteen I discovered writing as an escape from a world of reality in which I felt acutely uncomfortable.
Tennessee Williams
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