Truthful Expression Quotes

I've always noticed that if you speak the truth in a rather silly way nobody believes you.

An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.

I realized I was more convincing to myself and to the people who were listening when I actually said what I thought, versus what I thought people wanted to hear me say.

If people thought a quarter of what they speak, this world would be heaven.

So for everything I do, I'm very clear about what I'm doing, and I tell people what it's about. They get a sense of what I'm thinking. I don't let people think I'm going to write something in praise in the meatpacking industry, and then they read it and it's actually attacking the meatpacking industry.

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.

Whenever you try to preach something, people will not accept or invite it into their lives. But if it is said in a light way, people understand it better, and it is as true for films as it is for life.

Walk it how I talk it, so I talk it how I live it.

When a man talks from his heart, in his moment of truth, he speaks poetry.

I don't think one can write from a compromised moral position.

We hold back our true feelings and beliefs, whether it's from a sense of being polite or fear of hurting someone's feelings. But what I have seen on 'The Oprah Winfrey Show' is that no one benefits from holding back and keeping things bottled up inside. So I pride myself on speaking my mind and not being afraid to give honest feedback.

I'm not a politician; I am a singer. Long ago, they said, 'That one, she sings politics.' I don't sing politics; I merely sing the truth.

When I'm writing, it's because I'm trying to figure something out for myself. If I don't believe in what I've written, then how can I expect anyone else to believe in that, either?

If you don't say the honest thing, it never becomes true.

Pithy sentences are like sharp nails which force truth upon our memory.

Every man who says frankly and fully what he thinks is so far doing a public service. We should be grateful to him for attacking most unsparingly our most cherished opinions.

Christlike communications are expressions of affection and not anger, truth and not fabrication, compassion and not contention, respect and not ridicule, counsel and not criticism, correction and not condemnation. They are spoken with clarity and not with confusion. They may be tender or they may be tough, but they must always be tempered.

If ever I said in grief or pride, I'd tired of honest things, I lied.

All writers who can claim to be called 'living' must be political in a sense. They must have what the Quakers call a concern to understand what is happening in the world, and must engage themselves, in their writing, to promote no comfortable lies, of the sort which people will pay well to be told rather than the truth.

Who speaks the truth stabs falsehood to the heart.

After all, the commonplaces are the great poetic truths.

When Keats says: 'Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses', what he means is that we don't necessarily believe what a poem is saying if it comes out and tells us in an absolutely head-on, in-your-face way; we only believe it to be true if we feel it to be true.

I wrote 'Healthy Sick,' from our first LP, when I was 19. I'll happily play it till I'm 91 because it always feels good and truthful.

The expression of truth is simplicity.

The existence of the writer is to write, and to write is to tell the truth.