Quotes About Truth

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.

A great writer requires a great biography, and a great biography must tell the truth.

It is the test of a novel writer's art that he conceal his snake-in-the-grass; but the reader may be sure that it is always there.

All writers are liars. They twist events to suit themselves. They make use of their own tragedies to make a better story... They are terrible people.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

Writers of historical fiction are not under the same obligation as historians to find evidence for the statements they make. For us it is sufficient if what we say can't be disproved or shown to be false.

Artists - musicians, painters, writers, poets - always seem to have had the most accurate perception of what is really going on around them, not the official version or the popular perception of contemporary life.

Writers obviously have to bear witness to the harsh face of the age.

You can use your means in a good and bad way. In German-speaking art, we had such a bad experience with the Third Reich, when stories and images were used to tell lies. After the war, literature was careful not to do the same, which is why writers began to reflect on the stories they told and to make readers part of their texts. I do the same.

Writers, all the good ones, are Natural Born Liars.

However far fiction writers stray from their own lives and experiences - and I stray pretty far from mine - I think, ultimately, that we may be writing what we need to write in some way, albeit unconsciously.

The best writers who have put pen to paper have often had a journalism background.

I've met many, many writers who say they would never write about their family, never write about people they did not totally make up. But that is not the composition of my character.

A few people have tried to make me see that my writing isn't quite their thing by saying to me: 'What about realism?' To which my general response is, 'What about it?' However, I wouldn't be at all surprised if one of my favorite writers, Marilynne Robinson, was to say something similar if asked 'What about the fantastic?'

We are suffocated by writers who want to enlighten us with their truths. For me, the theatre is beautiful because it is a secret, and secrets seduce us, we all want to share secrets.

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

Sometimes I listen to songs by very smart writers who assume that the world is a civil place with certain formalities that people follow, but I don't see things that way. My own experience tells me that life is not like that.

Anyone who claims to be good at lying is obviously bad at lying. Thus - as a writer myself - I cannot comment on whether or not writers are exceptionally good liars, because whatever I said would actually mean its complete opposite.

Sometimes God writes straightforward in twisted lines.

The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.

It is no great art to say something briefly when, like Tacitus, one has something to say; when one has nothing to say, however, and none the less writes a whole book and makes truth into a liar - that I call an achievement.

I think anything that anyone writes that's any good is going to have a lot of autobiography.

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.'

My personal opinion is that if someone writes honestly about war, it will inherently be anti-war.