Truthful Narrative Quotes

My thing is to try to tell the truth as honestly as possible. For me, the weight is, how can I tell the truth through fiction, the best that I can?

Readers appreciate the truth. Why say, 'Some think a situation is a mess?' Based on my reporting, if a situation is a mess, then I say that. The truth is always what reporters tell each other when they get back to the newsroom.

If you're a drama writer, obviously you always have to tell the truth; there's no element of fiction in at all.

I find that the history books that we teach our kids with are not fully truthful, in my opinion.

I got this idea of doing a really serious big work-it would be precisely like a novel, with a single difference: Every word of it would be true from beginning to end.

The kind of fiction I'm trying to write is about telling the truth.

There is more beauty in truth, even if it is a dreadful beauty. The storytellers at the city gate twist life so that it looks sweet to the lazy and the stupid and the weak, and this only strengthens their infirmities and teaches nothing, cures nothing, nor does it let the heart soar.

Trust the tale, not the teller.

To him who knows how to read the legend, it conveys more truth than the chronicle.

Good writing is remembering detail. Most people want to forget. Don't forget things that were painful or embarrassing or silly. Turn them into a story that tells the truth.

I think that successful writers somehow capture truths that resonate with readers.

Say what you mean. Say what you see. Make a photograph, if you can, for the reader.

I was always at heart a novelist and wanted to tell a bigger story, so I wanted to create people who told other kinds of truths than literal truths.

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.

Young readers can sense when you're not addressing what's actually going on.

You don't necessarily need a script or actors to tell a compelling tale. Finding a person at a key moment in his life and rendering the truth as you see it - that's the truest form of drama.

My personal opinion is that if someone writes honestly about war, it will inherently be anti-war.

Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts.

I did try very hard to tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts.

I have written only what I have thought through, felt through and suffered through.

The truth isn't the truth until people believe you, and they can't believe you if they don't know what your saying, and they can't know what you've saying if they don't listen to you, and they won't listen to you if you're not interesting, and you won't be interesting until you say things imaginatively, originally, freshly.

I'm trying to tell a story and do it truthfully.

I'm not comparing myself at all to him, but I like the idea that Ernest Hemingway always wrote about certain things he knew, he knew the ins and outs, back to fronts of what he was talking about. I love that as an inspiration for myself, to keep it true to what you know.

I'm not a go-in-for-the-kill kind of interviewer. It's a great thing to me, that kind of interviewer, but I'm not it. It doesn't play to my strengths at all. I like to interview people who are interested in telling their story and tell it as truthfully as they can.

The time is not come for impartial history. If the truth were told just now, it would not be credited.