Quotes About Writing

I'm just writing about people. People are dark and complicated. I'm trying to tell the truth; that's all that I do.

Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use.

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.

There is no such thing as too ordinary to write about, whether that's life or a scene in a novel. What's interesting to people, whether it's memoir or fiction, is the truth.

Without a mission and a sense of whom you write for, you aren't worth reading.

For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it.

Contrary to all those times you've heard a writer confess at a reading that he writes fiction because he is a pathological liar, fiction writing is all about telling the truth.

The horrible truth is that I am lazy and I am going to write and do bits that just hand themselves to me.

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.

Despite all the cynical things writers have said about writing for money, the truth is we write for love. That is why it is so easy to exploit us.

If an historian be an unbeliever in all heroism, if he be a man who brings every thing down to the level of a common mediocrity, depend upon it, the truth is not found in such a writer.

When writing about oneself, one must strive to be truthful. Truth is more important than modesty.

Everything I write has a precedent in truth.

Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction.

Personal experience is the basis of all real literature.

The least learned, for the most part, have been always most ready to write.

When you can no longer differentiate between the insanity spewed onto the blank page, and the madness evident in the all-but shattered mirror...that's when you know you're doing it right.

The truth is you don't like the theater except the times when you're in a room by yourself putting the play on paper.

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.

Writing can teach us the dignity of speaking the truth.

The truth is that when you're writing a novel you're really living in it; you're living in the house, and you're living in the town.

I have been somebody who has not written a great deal about the truth of my family's life.

There is a big part of me that has a writer's sensibility. And so that's how I think. That's how I pursue truth. That's how I hope to communicate truth to people.

The truth is I tried to write for years and I wasn't very good.