John Metcalf Quotes

If something is presented as a fact, it has to be correct.

Whether the story reflects the facts is obviously a different matter.

Accuracy of statement is one of the first elements of truth; inaccuracy is a near kin to falsehood.

Never question the relevance of truth, but always question the truth of relevance.

Fact-checking doesn't exist primarily because some of us are liars and cheats. It exists because writers will be writers, much as they may mean to be historians.

Scripts can be slick and structured, but do they always contain the truth?

Accuracy of language is one of the bulwarks of truth.

I do not make stories up, full stop.

Everything I say is true.

What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth.

When truth and error have fair play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter.

Truth is a standard both of itself and of falsity.

I think you get into trouble as an author and a journalist when, rather than owning the gaps, you try to elide them.

If you bill something as a memoir, you're implying that everything in it is true.

In my career, I do not stop for news when it's not true.

Facts matter a great deal to me.

A man says something. Sometimes it turns out to be the truth, but this has nothing to do with the man who says it.

When I am giving the relation of a thing, remember to abstain from altering either in the matter or manner of speaking, so much, as that, if every one, afterwards, should alter as much, it would at last come to be properly false.

People know accuracy when they read it; they can feel it.

Truth is simply a compliment paid to sentences seen to be paying their way.

My purpose is to make my narrative as truthful as possible.

Truth is the best defense.

It's not cool to have your name in print when it's not the truth.

I aim to tell the truth about any subject, not a romance or fantasy, not avoid the truth.

Truth is so much more interesting than the fiction we're used to.