Truthful Writing Quotes

I write what I write.

Years ago I read an interview with Paula Fox in which she said that in writing, truth is just as important as story. Reading that interview was the first time I really understood that there's no point in trying to impress people with my cleverness when I can just try to write honestly about what matters most to me.

There are numerous layers to truth, and the simple and superficial statement of facts cannot satisfy the writer.

I'm trying to write truthfully about life, and naturalism, or the way people normally talk in movies, is a convention. The way I write is about life and is quite truthful, and there is a kind of brutal side to the relationship, and to the feelings, that makes it somewhat painful, but I think it's a very intense portrait of the relationship of two people. And a bit about what people feel like when they're alone, because it all takes place in one day, and during the day, they spend a lot of time alone in their different - you get to imagine what their fantasy lives are like.

I think the best writing is full of honesty and conviction. A lot of people are afraid to reveal much of themselves.

To express truth is to write naturally, forcibly, and delicately.

The thing to remember when you're writing is, it's not whether or not what you put on paper is true. It's whether it wakes a truth in your reader.

There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.

I feel like I try to write from an honest of a place as I can - without scaring people off too much, I guess.

Everything I've written has been personal and touched on things that I needed to deal with in my personal life. So I just feel that writing is great therapy, and the best writing comes from truth, and so I mine my life constantly for that.

But it is a writer's duty to write and speak and record the truth, always the truth, no matter whom may be offended.

Realism can break a writer's heart.

I will say, with memoir, you must be honest. You must be truthful.

My job is to look out on that world that I write about and be as honest as I possibly can about that world. If that's optimistic and uplifting, OK. If it's not, OK.

I wouldn't write about something that I haven't experienced myself.

I don't know where to start," one [writing student] will wail. Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. Flannery O' Connor said that anyone who has survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. Maybe your childhood was grim and horrible, but grim and horrible is Okay if it is well done. Don't worry about doing it well yet, though. Just get it down.

When you write you in a way write out of what you think of as your best self, the part of you that is lacking in foibles and weaknesses and egotism and vanities and so on. You're just trying to really say something as truthful as you can out of the best that you have in you.

All good writers speak in honest voices and tell the truth.

I'm very strict in my belief that non-fiction should be truthful, and fiction is for invented narratives.

I think I'm trying to write truthfully about life, and naturalism, or the way people normally talk in movies, is a convention. It's not the way people talk in life at all.

You have to write what you know.

I write about what I know and what I have experienced. This keeps me an "honest" writer.

From an early age, I had the idea that writing was truth-telling. It's on the record. Everybody can see it. Maybe it goes back to the sacred origins of literature - the holy book. There's nothing holy about it for me, but it should be serious, and it should be totally transparent.

My function as a writer is not story-telling but truth-telling: to make things plain.

They say, 'Write what you know.' What I know isn't cheerleader; it has a little bit of teeth to it.