Quotes About Truth

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

Part of my problem is that I cannot dispel the myths that have somehow accumulated over the years. Somebody writes something, it's completely off the wall, but it gets filed and repeated until everyone believes it. For instance, I've read that I wear a football helmet in the car.

Perfect objectivity is always impossible, no matter who writes a person's biography.

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

The authorized biographers - the ones hand-picked to write the sanitized version of a subject's life - sit up front with the swells while the unauthorized biographer who writes without access or approval gets elbowed to the back of the bus.

I wouldn't agree with some of the things that the press writes about and that's all I have to say about that.

Reality is self-defined as the mob, any mob, writes its own history, never to be contradicted by the quiet statement of truth.

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.

To find money to make a film, you have to write maybe 50 pages to explain what you'd like to do, what the film will be, but everybody lies. Because he doesn't know what the film will be. Everybody writes 50 pages and sends it to a TV channel, a producer, to get money, but everybody lies. Or else your film is not interesting.

Look, anything any writer writes is going to be on some level autobiographical. Part of the funny/sad thing is that you don't always know how autobiographical you're being.

I feel upset when someone writes something which isn't true about me. I cry, sulk, fight with everybody and the next day I'm fine!

Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth.

All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

Life is a racket. Writing is a racket. Sincerity is a racket. Everything's a racket.

There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.

If uncovering the truth is the greatest challenge of nonfiction writing, it is also the greatest reward.

In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

Fact-checking is so boring compared to writing fiction.

In writing, I try to find the right balance between momentum and infinity, truth and beauty.

I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that doesn't have a slant. All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born perpendicular, although many men are born upright.

When I was writing 'Trick it,' the inspiration for this song came out of nowhere! The song is about the little white lies you tell to people you care about, even though you can always tell the truth.

You don't just decide to destroy a person by making up stuff, and no one at 'SNL' is writing to go after someone.

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