Uncovering Truths Quotes

Dialogue can be a very dangerous pastime, for it may force us to give up some of our most cherished caricatures—and these die hard.

What writing does is to reveal.

A conventional playwright tries to tell you more about the characters than they know about themselves.

Music, I think, is best when it honestly explores personal demons, and it stirs around in the silt of the psyche to find out what's really there.

You can play women who have a face on or who zip something up, but you have to dig deeper to actually find the humanity and real aspects.

That's the novelist's job: to peel back the layers and look underneath.

To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.

I'm not a go-in-for-the-kill kind of interviewer. It's a great thing to me, that kind of interviewer, but I'm not it. It doesn't play to my strengths at all. I like to interview people who are interested in telling their story and tell it as truthfully as they can.

A hidden nerve is what every writer is ultimately about. It's what all writers wish to uncover when writing about themselves in this age of the personal memoir. And yet it's also the first thing every writer learns to sidestep, to disguise, as though this nerve were a deep and shameful secret that needs to be swathed in many sheaths.

Writing the book was itself a process of concealing and revealing.

Each person is an enigma. You're a puzzle not only to yourself but also to everyone else, and the great mystery of our time is how we penetrate this puzzle.

I'm ultimately drawn to film many kinds of stories if they are sort of about unlocking the secrets of our human potential.

I make work not to give answers but to question things.

My nature is to try and look past apparent truths, to pull back layers and understand the psychological motives behind phenomena.

I think there is something very relatable in the idea that you hit a certain age, later in your life, where you realize you have to pick up the rug and see what's underneath it and deal with stuff.

You journalists bulldoze life's mysteries, ignorant of what you're so ruthlessly turning up.

Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered.

I'm not going to tell a person how to think, don't believe in that. What I want to do, when I write these books, is just to say don't be so sure of yourself. Let me pull the carpet out from underneath you, and let's see if you can still find the footing.

Photographs can reveal something to us, and they can also conceal things.

I'm not interested in breaking news. I'm interested in telling the story of what's going on and then trying to figure it out.

A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.

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

I guess I'm just hopelessly fascinated by the realities that you can assemble out of connected fragments.

The act of writing is a way of tricking yourself into revealing something that you would never consciously put into the world. Sometimes I'm shocked by the deeply personal things I've put into books without realizing it.

The last thing I want to do is to write about real things. I am not interested in reality and in real human beings and their real day-to-day problems - I just want to say to them, 'Hold still, and I'm just going to unpack, see what's inside.'