William Saroyan Quotes

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.

If you want to be thought a liar, always tell the truth.

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.

If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you.

Truth is a well-known pathological liar. It invariably turns out to be Fiction wearing a fancy frock. Self-proclaimed Fiction, on the other hand, is entirely honest. You can tell this, because it comes right out and says, "I'm a Liar," right there on the dust jacket.

I try not to lie to people - the only way to control the way you're perceived is to tell the truth.

My own luck has been curious all my literary life; I never could tell a lie that anyone would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.

... if a man really and truly believed that black was white, you might advise him to see an oculist, but you mustn't call him a liar.

Why can you believe the lie, but not the truth?

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

It is not the lie that passeth through the mind, but the lie that sinketh in and settleth in it, that doth the hurt.

I'm interested in such things as the difference between how we perceive the world and what the world turns out to be. The difference is between the stories we tell others and the stories we tell ourselves. There is a wonderful Russian saying, which I use as the epigraph of one of my novels, which goes, He lies like an eyewitness. Which is very sly, clever and true.

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.

I have always loved truth so passionately that I have often resorted to lying as a way of introducing it into the minds which were ignorant of its charms.

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.

I am not sincere, even when I say I am not.

I can't establish the veracity of what people say because only they know whether they are telling the truth. I can't look into your mind, can I?

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

All truth is simple... is that not doubly a lie?

The truthful man is usually a liar.

Fortunately, I've done so many interviews that I've become very good at detecting when someone is giving a less-than-candid reply.

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.

I am a lie who always speaks the truth.

I can tell very quickly when people are lying.