Creative Truth Quotes

Art is a lie that makes us realise truth ... that is given us to understand.

There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the 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?

Drawing is the honesty of the art.

A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating.

If you're a drama writer, obviously you always have to tell the truth; there's no element of fiction in at all.

Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth.

What I've discovered is that in art, as in music, there's a lot of truth-and then there's a lie. The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth, but he slides it in amongst all the others. The tiny little lie is the moment I live for, my moment. It's the moment that the audience falls in love.

Some people are attracted to vulnerability. From my very first album, I've been vulnerable. I've always given parts of me, parts of my life - good, bad, ugly. I've never put up this image as a super-thug. Also, some people just like the music.

I sometimes say that I don't make anything up - obviously that's not true. But I am uninterested in writers who say that everything comes out of the imagination. I would rather be in a room with someone who is telling the story of his life, which may be exaggerated and even have lies in it, but I want to hear the true story, essentially.

I think that's always the hope - I mean, I can't speak for others, but I think other artists, no matter what type of medium they are using - whether it be from painting to acting to dancing, songwriting, or anything like that - I believe the desire is to get to the truth, and I think it's really hard to tell the truth.

True artistic expression lies in conveying emotion.

The poets are wrong of course […] But then poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth: which is why the truth they speak is so true that even those who hate poets by simple and natural instinct are exalted and terrified by it.

I'm more comfortable revealing myself than hiding behind metaphors. I respond to artists who reveal something of themselves.

There are two versions to every poem – the crying version and the straight version

The merit of poetry, in its wildest forms, still consists in its truth-truth conveyed to the understanding, not directly by the words, but circuitously by means of imaginative associations, which serve as its conductors.

I don't tend to work directly from life, except in trying to mimic or match the outlines of its insanity. In other words, when I live through something, I just try to say to myself, "OK, remember this - life is really this crazy or scary or beautiful or surprising - so try to 'get at' that in your stories.

No matter how happy or hopeful I am, I always tend to drift back to that. It's underneath all the music I've ever written... An artist is trying to tell you how he's feeling. And if that accidentally becomes entertaining, it becomes a career.

The thing to remember when you're writing is, it's not whether or not what you put on paper is true. It's whether it wakes a truth in your reader.

You arrive at truth through poetry; I arrive at poetry through truth.

Sometimes people save the best part of themselves for their art.

Honesty in art inspires and moves me. I am passionate about creating truthful experiences as much as I love being the spectator to a brilliant body of work.

I was always at heart a novelist and wanted to tell a bigger story, so I wanted to create people who told other kinds of truths than literal truths.

After all, the commonplaces are the great poetic truths.