Tim O'Brien Quotes

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

A lie was something that hadn't happened but might just as well have.

The world is a lie...not you and me.

Since I wasn't able to leave a succession of beautiful lies, I want to leave the smidgen of truth that the falsehood of everything lets us suppose we can tell.

Marilyn Monroe wasn't even her real name, Charles Manson isn't his real name, and now, I'm taking that to be my real name. But what's real? You can't find the truth, you just pick the lie you like the best.

Let me tell you the truth. The truth is what is, and what should be is a fantasy. A terrible, terrible lie that someone gave to the people long ago.

People like what is not true and they don't like what is true.

But an Adrian also knew that an Adrian's lies were real: they were lived and felt and acted out as thoroughly as another man's truths - if other men had truths - and he believed it possible that this last lie might see him through to the grave.

Truth may be stranger than fiction, goes the old saw, but it is never as strange as lies.

There are people who will say that this whole account is a lie, but a thing isn't necessarily a lie even if it didn't necessarily happen.

What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.

The reason why most people are frustrated is because a lie cannot be turned into a truth.

Don't lies eventually lead to the truth? And don't all my stories, true or false, tend toward the same conclusion? Don't they all have the same meaning? So what does it matter whether they are true or false if, in both cases, they are significant of what I have been and what I am? Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.

Truth is a theory that is constantly being disproved. Only lies, it seems, go on forever.

Truth lives on in the midst of deception.

nothing is more like truth than a lie, don't you find?

A lie is profanity. A lie is the worst thing in the world. Art is the ability to tell the truth.

Man can certainly keep on lying (and does so), but he cannot make truth falsehood.

That's the problem with the truth," Darcy said. "Liars and honest men both claim to have it.

Reality is easy. It's deception that's the hard work.

Truth is often the favorite tool of those who deceive.

And if that isn't the truth, it would be a lie.

All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.

I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.

Truth is always a delusion.