Lydia Hearst Quotes

The great thing about fiction is that you can start off by telling the truth, then start making stuff up like crazy whenever you feel like it.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Only in a novel are all things given full play.

The teller of a mirthful tale has latitude allowed him. We are content with less than absolute truth.

A film is not a documentary. And what's wonderful about film is that it's a real provocation for people. I never, ever see film as being an absolute version of the truth.

A novelist has a specific poetic license which also applies to his own life.

Writers can take offense when someone asks what's real or autobiographical in our work because, to us, that's not what counts. The bits taken from life are tiny scales on the dragon's tail - what about that whole beautiful writhing, fire-breathing dragon?

There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.

A writer's obligation is to invent: to go beyond what did happen and to look at what could have happened but didn't. Fiction writers are born liars.

I like writing because you can make things happen and turn out the way they never do in real life.

The best thing about being a fiction writer is that where the truth is inconvenient, I could veer away.

You have to take some dramatic license just to make it entertaining sometimes.

My art, like my acting, is a profound expression of poetic license.

You take some creative license when you make a movie, and things can be a little bit different.

The good thing about songwriting is you don't have to delineate between what's true and what's fiction; records aren't put on the shelf that way. Books are, movies are, but records aren't.

Oftentimes I feel like I can, through the music, paint a picture of something that I can't look anywhere and see in my real life.

This is one of the ways fiction is more liberating than nonfiction - I don't have to be so concerned with fact. I had the paradigm of certain people in my head who became my characters, but I never considered these people to be from a "certain sector of society," unless we agree that we're all from certain sectors of society.

Le mensonge et les vers de tout temps sont amis. Lies and literature have always been friends.

The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length.

Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.

Fiction is of the essence of poetry as well as of painting; there is a resemblance in one of human bodies, things, and actions which are not real, and in the other of a true story by fiction.

Already when I was very young, I was a fabulador. I loved to give my own version of stories that everybody already knew.

I don't care whether the story is real or fantastical. I tell the story that needs to be told.

Like all writers, I draw from life as I know it; but it's a refracted kind of reality, and none of it is factually true.

I write poetry anyway and have for years and years. For me, putting fiction and poetry together is like the best of both worlds.