Quotes About Writing

I know that DER SPIEGEL is a respected magazine. But I don't know whether it is possible for you to publish the truth about the Holocaust. Are you permitted to write everything about it?

Who does not know that the first law of historical writing is the truth.

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read.

In writing, I shall always confine myself strictly to the truth, except when it is attended with inconvenience.

If a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.

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

Best masters for the young writer and speaker are the fault- finding brothers and sisters at home who will not spare him, but willpick and cavil, and tell the odious truth.

I like the performing. And interviews, even. And the stuff that's not sitting in a room by yourself with empty paper. But I never loved writing, to tell you the truth.

The truth of the matter is that when you write about religion like I do, you're writing about something that people take very seriously.

Writers are the moral purifiers of the culture. We may not be pure ourselves but we must tell the truth, which is a purifying act.

If you find a way to write with open heart to Diary, a friend with Truth, no detail spared, your tome like Petrarch's works will contain the scattered fragments of your soul.

In order to be able to write a good joke, you have to find the truth.

I used to worry I was entirely uninteresting, but the truth is I think if my life was more exciting I'd never have any time to write.

One of the paradoxes of writing is that when you write non-fiction everyone tries to prove that it's wrong, and when you publish fiction, everyone tries to see the truth in it.

I think I might write a book. I like writing. People have asked me if I would get into politics, but I think I feel a lot more effective being a representative of truth through the arts.

The truth is, I wrote a novel when I was 23. It's hideously bad. Truly rotten.

History is always best written generations after the event, when clouded fact and memory have all fused into what can be accepted as truth, whether it be so or not.

I hate to force anything. A lot of people say that comedy is twenty percent truth, and eighty percent fallacy. I believe that you have to have lived through something to write about it.

Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.

The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years.

...he was after all, a novelist...and a novelist was simply a fellow who got paid to tell lies. The bigger the lies, the better the pay.

The reason authors almost always put a dedication on a book is, because their selfishness even horrifies themselves in the end.

Still, truth is how I remember it now. In a way, I am changing the past from my desk here in the future as I write. It always happens like this. This is how we all tell our story.

Writing is mostly a case of mood management. The emotion you have is not absolute, it is temporary. It may be useful, but it is not the truth. It is not you.