Anne Michaels Quotes

I was not out to paint beautiful pictures; even painting good pictures was not important to me. I wanted only to help the truth burst forth.

Autobiography is an unrivaled vehicle for telling the truth about other people.

The kids from the streets don't want preaching or messages. They want what they can identify with. They want to hear about the reality of their situation, not fairy tales. They don't care if it's ugly; they just want reality.

When you're 16 or 17, I think like most people that age, the first time you experience certain things in life, whether it's heartbreak or death or love, obviously it's going to seem like a much bigger deal.

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn't look at all like the way you said it before. I don't know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.

A good historian is timeless; although he is a patriot, he will never flatter his country in any respect.

I do want to go another way - to write something completely different.

I feel like my job is to look at the world and to report what I see, to write what I see as honestly and directly as I can. I don't want to cut it or make it easy, but be as direct as I can.

My idol is Emile Zola. He was a man of the left, so people expected of him a kind of 'Les Miserables,' in which the underdogs are always noble people. But he went out, and found a lot of ambitious, drunk, slothful and mean people out there. Zola simply could not - and was not interested in - telling a lie.

So many things go on in life that never find their way into the movies because so much of it is unappealing. But that's what I want to show.

My problem is being brutally honest. People don't like that.

My advice for telling someone else's story is to try not to consciously bend the story in any particular direction - to listen with an open mind, to include the good with the bad, to attempt to quell one's biases and allow the person you're writing about to emerge as wholly as possible, warts and all.

There's something specific about Chicagoans, and I just felt like I'd love to tell their story in a creative way. Not in a way to go, 'Oh, Chicago's perfect.' I don't believe that. I don't think that. I know we have our issues.

This is my point of view, and that's why I call the show 'Ramy'. I made the show that I would want to see. So it's only going to hit on certain things.

I must admit, I don't try to put my stamp on anything; it just happens. I don't really know how to think another way.

I'm brutally honest with people.

She had never had a boy talk to her like that. There was no cover of bullshit, no flirtation, no added charm, but his look was searing. He was different from anyone she had known.

…I go through a story for lies. I might discover the lie of trying to show off. Sometimes they’re lies of character. Sometimes they are lies of writing the most beautiful sentence in the world that has nothing to do with the story.

Unmixed praise is not due to any one. It leaves behind a sense of unreality. We can only do justice to a great man by a discriminating criticism. Hero-worship, which paints a faultless monster, whom the world never saw, is like those modern pictures which are a blaze of light without any shadow.

What I do is create a lens through my work that corrects my readers' cognitive dissonance and says: you will see all of it - not what you want or what makes you comfortable, but all of it. And you will not erase what displeases you.

I think people do look to writers to tell the truth in a way that nobody else quite will, not politicians or ministers or sociologists. A writer's job, is to, by way of fiction, somehow describe the way we live. And to me, this seems an important task, very worth doing, and I think also, to the reading public, it seems, even though they might not articulate it, it seems to them something worth doing also.

Most directors make films with their eyes; I make films with my testicles.

The truth is I like the crazy ones better than the well-behaved ones normally because they tend to be the passionate ones. They never come after you if you're holding up your end. The only thing that's bad about an abusive director is that they bully the people they can.

This was not a fearie tale. This was not the movies. This was life. It hurt more. It was excruciating. It was excruciatingly beautiful.

I hate when things are sugar-coated. I'd rather have the ugliest truth than the best lie.