Objective Writing Quotes

When you write for somebody else, you've got to write from their standpoint. You can't really write from your own point of view.

I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.

The essayist has to follow a certain intellectual pattern. The novelist has the advantage of using fantasy, of being subjective.

To a chemist, nothing on earth is unclean. A writer must be as objective as a chemist; he must abandon the subjective line; he must know that dungheaps play a very respectable part in a landscape, and that evil passions are as inherent in life as good ones.

Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts.

There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.

I was never a wet-eyed, passionate writer; I was always a policeman.

Reconnaissance memoranda should always be written in the simplest style and be purely descriptive. They should never stray from their objective by introducing extraneous ideas.

Point of view is present in anything I write, but I really try to let the subject and facts speak for themselves.

I feel like my job is to look at the world and to report what I see, to write what I see as honestly and directly as I can. I don't want to cut it or make it easy, but be as direct as I can.

It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

There is this assumption that much of what I write is about my life, and that simply is not true.

I just feel that if I'm English and writing about an American president, I have got to have someone on my side who can help me out when I'm lapsing into lazy or obvious European skepticism.

Useful though they are, the vast majority of dictionaries and encyclopedias are poker-faced pieces of work that stick to the facts and present them as soberly - and unstylishly - as possible.

I do not wish to produce prose that draws attention to itself, rather than the world it describes.

Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.

I'm very comfortable writing in the first person; it dives into the character in a way that's difficult if you're writing in the third person.

From fiction, you do not get to learn much because it is only imagination. Whereas, from non-fiction, people can understand and learn from the realities it covers.

In my couple of books, including Going Clear, the book about Scientology, I thought it seemed appropriate at the end of the book to help the reader frame things. Because we've gone through the history, and there's likely conflictual feelings in the reader's mind. The reader may not agree with me, but I don't try to influence the reader's judgment. I know everybody who picks this book up already has a decided opinion. But my goal is to open the reader's mind a little bit to alternative narratives.

If there's a group of articles written about me, I can usually tell the difference if someone's writing an article and they know me from someone who doesn't know me. They're usually very different.

If uncovering the truth is the greatest challenge of nonfiction writing, it is also the greatest reward.

A writer has to stand outside the page. It's not for the writer to shed tears onto the pages for these characters. It's not for him to suffer or to laugh or to experience ecstasy or agony in the manner of the characters on the pages.

I never really understood the idea that nonfiction ought to be this dispensary of data that we have at the moment.

Any time you write history, you insert your opinion. You pick and choose what you are going to write about. I feel really happy not inserting myself. I spend too much of my life inserting myself. It's just great to let other people carry the narrative.

I sort of mind living in a time when most of the literature is terribly personal. I suppose it's because I grew up on a love of history, philosophy, science and religion, but not to think too much about yourself.