Howard Jacobson Quotes

I like the purity of telling stories now because not a lot of people are telling stories in their music. I wanna tell my specific story: what I see right now.

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.

When you write down your life, every page should contain something no one has ever heard about.

I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness.

I am a writer, which means I write stories, I write novels, and I would write poetry if I knew how to. I don't want to limit myself.

There's actually nothing interesting about me except what I write.

As a novelist, I ask of myself only that I tell the truth and that I tell it beautifully.

I think of myself as a storyteller, and that is it.

To be honest, I don't think I'm an actor. I'm a creator - or try to be.

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

Life would be much easier if I just wrote the same book over and over again. But I'm not interested in doing that.

I'm a writer. My job is to speak what - that which I think is true. If that bridges the gap, that's good. If it doesn't, that's too bad.

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.

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

Write your own stories.

You can only write your own vision.

My thing is to try to tell the truth as honestly as possible. For me, the weight is, how can I tell the truth through fiction, the best that I can?

When you work at a magazine, you have to tell the truth. When you're not working in that format, it's fun to see where your mind takes you when the dictates have nothing to do with anyone but yourself.

Both of my parents were journalists, and my rebellion, such as it was, was to become a fiction writer.

Fiction writing feels more honest to me.

He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to.

I write from my imagination, not from what I've read in books or seen on TV or to make money. I wrote from an idea I was passionate about.

I tell stories. That's what I do. I've always told stories.

My advice would be to write what is most personal and specific to your experience or your life. And your voice will emerge and because of its specificity, it will be universal.

Autobiography is probably the most respectable form of lying.