William Faulkner Quotes

Pain will force even the truthful to speak falsely.

If you have never been tortured, or locked up and verbally threatened, you may find it hard to believe that anyone would confess to something he had not done. Intuition holds that the innocent do not make false confessions.

My dad once told me, he was like, 'The only time you should lie is when someone's holding a gun to your head and says 'Okay, lie or I'm going to shoot you.' And that really stuck with me.

Under questioning, a terrorist should be made to yield.

An untruth must be spoken, where need requires. For whether men lie, or say true, it is with one and the same object. Men lie, because they think to gain by deceiving others; and speak the truth, because they expect to get something by their true speaking, and to be trusted afterwards in more important matters. Thus, though their conduct is so opposite, the end of both is alike. If there were no gain to be got, your true-speaking man would tell untruths as much as your liar, and your liar would tell the truth as much as your true-speaking man.

When treating with liars, even an honest man must lie.

I'd rather be a liar than an asshole.

The fact about himself that the liar hides is that he is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality; we are not to know that he wants us to believe something he supposes to be false. The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him . . . He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

Truth-telling frightens me. Lying confuses me.

The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.

Nobody has the right to put another under such a difficulty that he must either hurt the person by telling the truth or hurt himself by telling what is not true.

One of my biggest problems in life has been my inability to lie.

Then what are you like, Annabel?" he shot back. "A liar, like you told me that first day? Come on. That was the biggest lie of all.

They say that it is the practiced liar who can deceive. But so often the practiced and chronic liar deceives only himself; it is the man who all his life has been selfconvicted of veracity whose lies find quickest credence.

If you get into crime you gotta know that everybody's a criminal and everybody's a liar, and everybody has the potential to backstab you, because it's not an honest profession. So don't go into crime and look for honesty.

With torture ,as with making love, foreplay is the all important factor

Maggie, we're through with lies and liars in this house. Lock the door.

I'm planning, you see, to try to confine myself to the truth. That's hard for an old, inveterate fantasy martyr and liar who has never hesitated to give truth the form he felt the occasion demanded.

Are you insinuatin' that my daughter is a liar?" "Oh, no, not at all. I'm saying your daughter is a liar. Surely you can appreciate the difference.

Be bad, but at least don't be a liar, a deceiver!

Everyone seems to be running against a liar, but nobody seems to be one. Odd - I mean, the math doesn't work out.

A liar goes in fine clothes, a liar goes in rags, a liar is a liar, clothes or no clothes.

The liar suffers twice: he neither believes nor is believed.

A liar is not believed even though he tell the truth.

True liars never love. True lovers never lie.