Quotes About Accuracy

People think they're getting objective information, but they're not. They're getting news wrapped up in opinion.

I have long argued that no one should be allowed to write opinion without spending years as a reporter - nothing like interviewing all four eyewitnesses to an automobile accident and then trying to write an accurate account of what happened.

If you're going to write, then write a novel with a Haitian woman in it and try and describe her accurately. When you can do that, you can write about people.

Poe is the only impeccable writer. He was never mistaken.

A writer's job is to tell the truth.

The challenge for a writer looking at history is to figure out what is history and what is myth. After all, what you are looking at is an interpretation of history, and so at some level, it becomes an interpretation of an interpretation.

The deaf culture is portrayed very accurately on 'Switched at Birth' because the writers did the opposite of the norm. They did their homework before portraying anything on television.

The writers want to know were you made your mistake, no how well your curve is breaking.

Writers don't have to keep themselves honest. They have to keep themselves accurate.

What makes me furious, not just because we're in an interview, but I don't like when writers take your words and put them somewhere else, in the wrong context in their own article about you.

I don't mind being asked anything! Not at all. I tell you what is annoying, is when you say something and somebody writes something that's completely different to what you said, and you're like, 'well that's not nice, because that's not what happened.'

A good journalist is not the one that writes what people say, but the one that writes what he is supposed to write.

Every historian with professional standards speaks or writes what he believes to be true.

If a columnist writes that something happened on a certain date, or that the government spent a certain amount of money on something, or that a specific number of people have died in the war in Iraq, to pick a few examples, it is his or her responsibility to make certain that information is correct.

Fact-checking is so boring compared to writing fiction.

Whosoever, in writing a modern history, shall follow truth too near the heels, it may happily strike out his teeth.

Peck Valley would have shuddered a bit had it known the easy ethics of its mortuary artist in such debatable matters as the ownership of costly "laying-out" apparel invisible beneath the casket's lid, and the degree of dignity to be maintained in posing and adapting the unseen members of lifeless tenants to containers not always calculated with sublimest accuracy. Most distinctly Birch was lax, insensitive, and professionally undesirable;

Beneath their strict conventionalisation one could grasp the minute and accurate observation and graphic skill of the artists; and indeed, the very conventions themselves served to symbolise and accentuate the real essence or vital differentiation of every object delineated.

Memories are something we reconstruct and piece together. They are fragments we manufacture to create what we think occurred or even simply hope to be true. In short, our memories are rarely accurate. They are biased reenactments.

In order to be totally spontaneous, you can't be too obsessed with accuracy, but if you're inaccurate in a drawing, it will look fake, and when you act, it will sound fake. You have to find miraculously some proper balance between the two, but there's no formula.

At the end of the day, the numbers that we're hearing are not going to be totally correct or not correct at all.

You must be absolutely honest and true in the depicting of a totem for meaning is attached to every line. You must be most particular about detail and proportion.

Justice and truth are too such subtle points that our tools are too blunt to touch them accurately.

Being flooded with information doesn't mean we have the right information or that we're in touch with the right people.