Brian K. Vaughan Quotes

I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.

Telling ourselves that fiction is in a sense true and at the same time not true is essential to the art of fiction. It's been at the heart of fiction from the start. Fiction offers both truth, and we know it's a flat-out lie. Sometimes it drives a novelist mad. Sometimes it energizes us.

Oh, mercy, I think we're all storytellers, you know. You think of the excuses you told your parents for why you got home late. I just never gave it up.

Contrary to all those times you've heard a writer confess at a reading that he writes fiction because he is a pathological liar, fiction writing is all about telling the truth.

Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.

I always say show me a storyteller who doesn't embellish, and I'll show you a bad one.

I love to write what I see and what I do and what I experience, and I like to see if people can relate to that. I don't know if I am as good at making up a story in my head that has no truth to it, so that is a challenge for me.

Fiction is lies; we're writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. But it has to have a truth at the core of it.

Writing stories is the habit of lying put to good use.

The truth is always less interesting than the fiction.

I sometimes say that I don't make anything up - obviously that's not true. But I am uninterested in writers who say that everything comes out of the imagination. I would rather be in a room with someone who is telling the story of his life, which may be exaggerated and even have lies in it, but I want to hear the true story, essentially.

I make it all up, and all of it is true.

What is the difference between the novelist and the liar? At some moments, I have often wondered.

Poets themselves, tho' liars by profession, always endeavour to give an air of truth to their fictions.

Writers are liars my dear, surely you know that by now?

Falsehood is a critical element in fiction. Part of the thrill of being told a story is the chance of being hoodwinked. . .The telling of lies is a sort of sleight of hand that displays our deepest feelings about life.

Lies are just stories, and stories are all that matter. We all tell stories. Some are more truthful than others, maybe, but in the end the only thing that counts is what you can make people believe.

One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.

It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

I have a great fondness for the liars in my stories.

I've made up so many stores about my name, I can't remember.

A writer of fiction is really... a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

Writers, all the good ones, are Natural Born Liars.

I was always at heart a novelist and wanted to tell a bigger story, so I wanted to create people who told other kinds of truths than literal truths.

I don't believe that anything's totally invented... If you're completely inventing a story, there wouldn't be an urge to tell it.