I have no problem in moving a date one way or another or coming up with a subplot that gets my characters in (or out) of a fix more rambunctiously than the extant records show.

— Sara Sheridan

I'm an oracle of the past. I can accurately predict up to 1 minute in the future, by thoroughly investigating the last 2 years of your life. Also, I look like an old database – flat and full of useless info.

— Will Advise

In many ways. . .the completeness of biography, the achievement of its professionalization, is an ironic fiction, since no life can ever be known completely, nor would we want to know every fact about an individual. Similarly, no life is ever lived according to aesthetic proportions. The "plot" of a biography is superficially based on the birth, life and death of the subject; "character," in the vision of the author. Both are as many creations of the biographer, as they are of a novelist. We content ourselves with "authorized fictions.

— Ira Bruce Nadel

Intellectuals are judged not by their morals, but by the quality of their ideas, which are rarely reducible to simple verdicts of truth or falsity, if only because banalities are by definition accurate.

— Perry Anderson

It has always seemed to me that so long as you produce your dramatic effect, accuracy of detail matters little. I have never striven for it and I have made some bad mistakes in consequence. What matter if I hold my readers?

— Arthur Conan Doyle

It is good to have a reason for every action you perform other than blaming others for your faults.

— Auliq Ice

It's pretty generally understood that men don't aspire after the absolute right, but only to do about as well as the rest of the world. Now, when anyone speaks up, like a man, and says slavery is necessary to us, we can't get along without it, we should be beggared if we give it up, and, of course, we mean to hold on to it, —this is strong, clear, well-defined language; it has the respectability of truth to it; and, if we may judge by their practice, the majority of the world will bear us out in it. But when he begins to put on a long face, and snuffle, and quote Scripture, I incline to think he isn't much better than he should be.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

It's simple, it's not that simple; or life is simple, but the things in it are not. When a man does not understand it, he tends to inflate it. When he does, he tends to deflate it. In the end, neither of the images are fully accurate.

— Criss Jami

It will be worth it if I am remembered, if not flatteringly, then at least with some small amount of accuracy.

— Patrick Rothfuss

Let's be honest about journalists: We find a lot of ways of being wrong.

— E.J. Dionne Jr.