Miguel de Cervantes Quotes

There’s dramatic license, which is necessary or nothing’s fun, and historical truth, which is necessary or nothing’s understood.

The poet may say or sing, not as things were, but as they ought to have been; but the historian must pen them, not as they ought to have been, but as they really were.

Who does not know that the first law of historical writing is the truth.

The first law for the historian is that he shall never dare utter an untruth. The second is that he shall suppress nothing that is true. Moreover, there shall be no suspicion of partiality in his writing, or of malice.

To what degree are historians chroniclers of the truth and to what degree are they just novelists, frankly?

I try and write the way things happen. I don't try and fulfill people's wishes.

There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.

No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets truth.

Truth: An ingenious compound of desirability and appearance …

What makes a good writer of history is a guy who is suspicious. Suspicion marks the real difference between the man who wants to write honest history and the one who'd rather write a good story.

Who does not know history's first law to be that an author must not dare to tell anything but the truth? And its second that he must make bold to tell the whole truth? That there must be no suggestion of partiality anywhere in his writings? Nor of malice?

The first law of history is to dread uttering a falsehood; the next is not to fear stating the truth; lastly, the historian's writings should be open to no suspicion of partiality or animosity.

The poets are almost always wrong about the facts... That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth...

History is not history unless it is the truth.

one reason why I like writing poetry - you can say so many things in it that are true in poetry but wouldn't be true in prose.

My pictures are complex and so am I. When I am almost symbolistic in writing, there is a more limiting difference’s of accepting, while I can be even more complex in the photographs and people can usually accept them within the framework of their own limitations or lack of limitations – there is no dictionary meaning… they can look up for the photographic image and allow it to confuse them.

I do not think that my films or films by any other filmmaker represent "THE TRUTH." I do not feel the need to categorize my films or anyone else's.

Art remains the one way possible of speaking truth.

If what you write is true, it will not be so because of what you are as a writer but because of what you are as a being. There can be no literary equivalent to truth.

As a writer, I demand the right to write any character in the world that I want to write. I demand the right to be them, I demand the right to think them and I demand the right to tell the truth as I see they are.

There are nine-and-sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, And every single one of them is right.

Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul.

So very difficult a matter is it to trace and find out the truth of anything by history.

I don't think the revisionist historians are accurate. I think their agendas are clouded by selfishness and anger and rage.

People should be stopped from writing poetry. There's far too much of it. And if they're any good, they'll go ahead anyways.