Kathryn Stockett Quotes

The truth is that every writer, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, is trying to write something truly original and that's what I think I'm doing.

I think theatre to some extent is always about telling stories, isn't it, and I think what I've learned is that freedom comes when you tell your story; freedom comes when you tell the truth.

Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.

When you sit down to write, you have to be prepared to strip all of those voices away, all of the censors away, and talk about what you think the truth is, which I think is really the task of the writer - to get to the truth.

The truth is, for however much my stories come out of things that have happened to me, they're not darkly or as deeply personal as someone like Marc Maron or a lot of comedians, but they are essentially my life and my interpretation of it.

When you're writing personal stories, you have to be totally uncompromising - to the extent that you can be - about yourself. I know that if I am uber-uncompromising with myself, that gives me some latitude to write about others.

This is not Tolstoy. I don't want to know what critics and professors think of what I'm writing. It might hurt my feelings.

People ask me, 'What do you do?' And I tell them I'm a writer, but always with the silent reservation, 'I am, of course, not really a writer. Hemingway was a writer.'

I've always been inspired by Genet, Henry Miller and Hubert Selby, Jr., who taught me that you've got to tell a bigger truth in whatever you're doing, but the truth is not popular.

If you're gonna tell your life story, you gotta be honest, or don't do it.

I write what I write.

A memoir is always the most authentic telling of a situation, but a novel gets to different places.

A writer should have this little voice inside of you saying, Tell the truth. Reveal a few secrets here.

The truth is that I'm an idiot. I am. I don't do things by the rules sometimes. I say things that I probably shouldn't say. I push buttons. I deserve to be made fun of. And I feel like, as soon as you can make fun of something, it instantly removes the fear.

Who has ownership over stories these days?

For me, 'risky' is revealing what really happened in my life through music. Risky is writing confessional songs and telling the true story about a person with enough details so everyone knows who that person is.

The hardest part is telling one's story. Once the story is on the page, the rest will come.

I always tell people, I never get writer's block because it's coming straight from my brain, like, real-life experiences. I'm like the news. I'm just reporting it for myself.

There's always an element of truth to what I write because that's why I write.

Social media allowed us to become our own storytellers. With it, we seized the power of our truth.

You just have to tell your authentic stories, and hopefully, it resonates. Whatever your story is, you just have to tell it authentically.

I realized that even though I had this urge, this longing, to write about other people, in order for it to be emotionally gripping, I needed to be in there somehow.

It was like a dream come true for me. When you write the book, it's still intimate. It might have been a best-seller but it's still my story, as I wrote it. The moment we or they make a movie, it's not my story anymore. There's a lot of letting go involved in the process.

You do your best to tell your own story, in the most specific way, and then you hope that that travels well, when it's done with heart and honesty.

I think if I was interested in writing on my own, I would be a novelist - then you could write about yourself, and that would be it. You wouldn't need anyone else.