Writing Honesty Quotes

For 35 years, I was a writer. I wrote a lot of jokes. Some of them weren't funny. Some of them weren't appropriate. Some of them were downright offensive. I understand that.

There's this quote by a writer, Emil Cioran, he's a Romanian writer. He says that you should only put things in books that you would never dare to say to people in real life. So there is that feeling of acute embarrassment, or that you've been too revealing. I think it's some kind of survival mechanism where I never think of the reader, ever. Because then I would start censoring myself.

You can lie to your wife or your boss, but you cannot lie to your typewriter. Sooner or later you must reveal your true self in your pages.

It's really hard to talk about writing, and I'm usually conscious if I'm misleading people or misleading the questioner, because the problem with writing is the next line.

Most writers write books that they wouldn't read. I ought to know; I've done it myself.

I mean, I'm always happy if I have, like, humiliating asshole things that I did. I think: Oh good, that's a good story. Because if you write about humiliating asshole things other people do it doesn't work as well. I mean, you can, but you can get away with it better if you talk about what an asshole you are. It's much easier.

In my experience, when you're writing, you want the truth, and you don't want to be apologetic in any way. But there is something in writing, the complexity of it, that works against that aim.

I write about what I know and what I have experienced. This keeps me an "honest" writer.

Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.

If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

The paper is patient, but the reader is not.

A good writer sells out everybody he knows, sooner or later.

Even if you have nothing to write, write and say so.

It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader. If you do not believe in the characters or the story you are doing at that moment with all your mind, strength, and will, if you don't feel joy and excitement while writing it, then you're wasting good white paper, even if it sells, because there are other ways in which a writer can bring in the rent money besides writing bad or phony stories.

The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. All the outs are too easy, and the thing itself is too hard to do.

Ultimately, you can only ever write what you know. It's logically and philosophically impossible to write what you don't know.

If you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you.

Any writer who says he loves writing is crazy. Or lying.

Readers are very, very savvy, and I don't want to insult them by making them think I'm too lazy to get it right.

I'm horrified most of the time. I wish it was more complicated, but at the same time, each time I try to complicate it I hate it because I hate the idea of writing to impress.

Even the most honest writer lets slip a word too many when he wants to round off a period.

If you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair.

I tell my students you have an absolute right to write about people you know and love. You do. But the kicker is you have a responsibility to make the characters large enough that you will not have sinned against them.

I try and write honestly about what I see around me now.