Woody Guthrie Quotes

As writers, it is our job not only to imagine, but to witness.

A writer's work is to witness things.

Truth maybe stranger than fiction, but fiction is truer.

I write about what I know, what I live, what I observe.

To be a writer you need to see things as they are, and to see things as they are you need a certain basic innocence.

To write about a place, you have to live there.

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.

Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid.

If a man writes a book, let him set down only what he knows. I have guesses enough of my own.

While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.

A writer is not a prophet, is not a philosopher; he's just someone who is witness to what is around him. And so writing is a way to... it's the best way to testify, to be a witness.

I see things with my own eyes, just as if they were the first eyes that ever saw, and then I set about to tell, as best I can, just what I've seen.

I'll see something, and I'll go, 'Oh, wow, that's interesting,' because really, comedy comes from the truth.

Write about what you know, that's what I say.

To paint things as they are requires a minute attention, and employs the memory rather than the fancy.

The point of departure must always be a vision of the truth. The eye is the route of the soul, and the pencil or brush must sincerely and naïvely reproduce what it sees.

To create is not to deform or invent persons and things. It is to tie new relationships between persons and things which are, and as they are.

Everything I wrote was true because I believed what I saw.

Writing is seeing. It is paying attention.

The fictional eye sees in, through, and around what is really there.

Any fool may write a most valuable book by chance, if he will only tell us what he heard and saw with veracity.

It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Before you can write anything, you have to notice something.

That's all a writer has to write about - what he sees and hears and what not.

I believe that reality is vastly richer than the cursory attention we usually give it permits us to understand. I like to write through a consciousness that allows me to suggest something of this richness.

In order to write about life first you must live it.