Unflinching Honesty Quotes

I stand for truth. Truth will never ally itself with falsehood. Even if all the world should be against me, Truth must prevail in the end.

One has to have a complicated kind of optimism. You can't refuse to look at how horrible things are.

The upshot here is that Gil Scott-Heron is still a warrior, even if the front lines have moved. He's made a record not without hope but which doesn't come with any easy or comforting answers. In that way, the man is clearly still committed to speaking the truth.

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

Being of no party, I shall offend all parties:—never mind! My words at least, are more sincere and hearty Than if I sought to sail before the wind.

As a blogger, Chez Pazienza is filled with outrage, passion and insight -- delivered with a distinctive point of view, a wicked sense of humor, and a two-fisted style of prose. In Dead Star Twilight, he turns all these on himself -- and produces a fierce, funny, disturbing, but ultimately uplifting memoir. This is the book A Million Little Pieces dreamed of being.

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.

Certain things can't be approximated, so I'm always interested in getting in another way, one which makes the reader bend in closer to the scene even if that scene, especially if that scene, is painful... Brutal language isn't necessarily the most truthful way of describing a brutal moment.

If I was gonna write a book that was true, and I was gonna write a book that was honest, then I was gonna have to write about myself in very, very negative ways.

Penn Cage I think of as annoyingly righteous sometimes. He's almost too good.

Robert Taft—A Leader Who Said Only What He Thought Was Right, And Had The Courage To Say It

I'm brutally honest with people.

Turing was uncompromisingly honest. As soon as he didn't think you were interesting or smart, he'd just turn around and walk away, even if you were in the middle of a sentence.

My wife is the most savage critic. She doesn't feel intimidated by my reputation. As far as she's concerned, she's just criticising a boyfriend who'd recently had a go at fiction. She can tell me to abandon whole novels.

I admire writers who succeed at what I consider the first demand of art: that the artist vivisect himself without pity, without hesitation, determined to reveal whatever he might find.