Life does not tell stories. Life is chaotic, fluid, random; it leaves myriads of ends untied, untidily. Writers can extract a story from life only by strict, close selection, and this must mean falsification. Telling stories really is telling lies.
B.S. Johnson quoted in Nick Hornby The Polysyllabic Spree
Listen to your intuition; remember the power of nouns; don’t start at the beginning, start anywhere at all, and above all, tell the truth.
Beth Powning (paraphrasing EL Doctorow’s advice to her in the early 70s)
Who knows, in the end, what is true?
Not you. Especially not you.
Carol Shields
This seems to me to be fiction’s magic, that it attempts to be an account of all that cannot be documented but is, nevertheless, true.
Carol Shields
If we had to say what writing is, we would define it essentially as an act of courage.
Cynthia Ozick
I keeps telling them, they’re like you for telling the lie, but it’s a funny thing that a lie becomes a story simply because it’s written down.
Donna Morrissey
The human predicament is universal and also intensely personal and curious, and is the subject of all serious fiction.
Ethel Wilson “Somewhere Near the Truth”
The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode.
Flannery O’Connor
I say, keep hold of a few plain truths, and make everything square with them.
George Eliot
I’m not trying to get across a specific message or accuse anyone or give testimony or capture the world with what I write, but I do want to tell the truth. It seems to me that truth is important because … only the truth touches people’s hearts.
Isabel Allende
For the present, I am not sure of having always written the truth. I suspect that in my story there are a few false memories.
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Other Death”
Writers make lies not to deceive, but to tell the truth better than the actual truth does.
Julie Powell (Ink Q&A Powells)
As a matter of fact I dare not tell the truth … The only way to exist is to go on and try and lose oneself – to get as far as possible away from this moment. Once I can do that all will be well. So it’s stories or nothing.
Katherine Mansfield (Letter to Murray)
I also felt it was telling me some very important things re: writing any kind of memoir. One can choose to leave some things out, as indeed Olsen certainly does in writing of herself, but what one puts in has to be as true as one’s fiction and that is pretty darn true, as we know!
Margaret Laurence, A Letter to Adele Wiseman, 20 January, 1979
It always comes down to the same necessity; go deep enough and there is a bedrock of truth, however hard.
May Sarton
I write fiction to tell the truth.
Pam Houston
The truth is what you are worth.
Susan Howe
What does a writer want from his family? The truth. What does a family want from its writer? Just the praise, please.
Terese Svoboda, P&W Sept/Oct 2008 “Family War Stories”
“There are no truths, Coyote,” I says. “Only stories.”
Thomas King
As a character in this novel, I object.
Ursula Hegi
If you don’t tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people.
Virginia Woolf