Milan Kundera Quotes

I'm interested in trying to explore what I think is the truth at a given time in my life, and part of the process of being honest is - in my mind - talking about the idea that you're watching a movie. You're sitting here watching a movie. And I like that. It appeals to me intellectually, and also in a way I can't even explain.

Through my films I'm eventually trying to one day tell the truth. I don't know if I'm ever going to get there, but I'm slowly letting pieces of myself out there and then maybe by the time I'm 85, I'll look back and say, 'All right, that about sums it up.'

At the most basic level, I appreciate writers who have something to say.

I do not just write, I write what I am. If there is a secret, perhaps that is it.

You never know what you will learn till you start writing. Then you discover truths you never knew existed.

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.

I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life.

I always think I know the way a novel will go. I write maps on oversized art pads like the kind I carried around in college when I was earnest about drawing. I need to have some idea of the shape of the novel, where its headed, so that I can proceed with confidence. But the truth is my characters start doing and saying things I don't expect.

This is a cliche, but in fiction, I feel it is easier for me to get to some sort of truth, some kind of more honest writing.

What writing does is to reveal.

Writing is far too hard work to say what someone else wants me to. Serving it as a craft, using it as a way of growing in my own understanding, seems to me to be a beautiful way to live. And if that product is shareable with other people, so much the better.

It seems that writing chose me. I feel that because I know history, and I know the history of so many cultures; I have lived a large life.

If you're a writer, you know there are ways in which we don't know what we're doing at all. We're working out mysteries in a sort of poetic realm, and hoping that if a story is honest, if you're dragging the deep truth out of yourself, then something good and profound might come out of it.

I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts.

When I'm writing, I'm never trying to teach anything - maybe I'm trying to illuminate.

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.

I wrote poetry and short stories. I would send them to magazines; they wouldn't get in. But short stories are how I found philosophy and how I'd understand the world.

The aim of any writer, even a fantasy writer, is the pursuit of truth.

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?

It's just never the same. At least for me.It's probably because it's just who I am, I never know what that [truth] is. It's so momentary to go, "Oh, yeah, that's true." That's a fundamental starting point for me - to figure out what's true from moment to moment to moment.

We sometimes find truth, but more often it finds us.

My art is just an effort to express the truth of my being in gesture and movement. It has taken me long years to find even one absolutely true movement.

If a storyteller worried about the facts - my dear Lucian, how could he ever get at the truth?

Writing is not lying, nor is it theft. It is a journey and search for transparency between one’s words and one’s soul.

I don't think the function of writing, at least for me as a fiction writer, is to say to people, "Here's the answer." It's not an op-ed.