Italo Calvino Quotes

You've learned that every good lie is threaded with truth and every accepted truth leaks lies.

You can read everybody. It's not even interesting to tell the truth because to some extent it's false.

A good portion of speaking will consist in knowing how to lie.

Truth is seldom appreciated and never understood, whereas a flattering lie is always appreciated and instantly understood.

Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

We're all liars when it serves our purpose.

There wasn't any more truth in over half of what any so-called orator said. If it wasn't a Deliberate Lie, why it was an Exaggerated Falsehood.

Lies are infinite in number, and the truth so small and singular.

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

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.

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

The bullshitter is neither on the side of the true or the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

Liars are the cause of all the sins and crimes in the world.

Your truths are worse than your lies.

You can't really pretend something is rosier than it is and expect people to buy it.

A lie cannot live.

Men lie the most. Men lie all the time.

Lying is done with words and also with silence.

I can't say why people lie; they just do. Everyone has their own reasons for not telling the truth.

If one is to be called a liar, one may as well make an effort to deserve the name.

I suppose I shouldn't go around admitting I speak untruths on the radio.

It is a poor cause which has to be lied for regularly.

Anybody who says they are a good liar obviously is not, because any legitimately savvy liar would always insist they're honest about everything.

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.

The essence of lying is in deception, not in words.