Paul McCartney Quotes

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

I was never a good journalist, because I would make things up. A lot of people frowned on that, which is why I ended up in fiction.

I was one of the most brilliant liars as a child.

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

My mother talked about the stories I used to spin as a child of three, before I started school. I would tell this story about what school I went to and what uniform I wore and who I talked to at lunchtime and what I ate, and my mother was like, 'This girl does not even go to school.'

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

If I have a choice between looking something up and making it up, I'll make it up every time.

I love to invent - avoiding the truth. I need to dramatize.

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

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.

I adore falseness. I don't want you to tell me accurately what happened yesterday. I want you to lie about it, to exaggerate, to entertain me.

The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.

Lies can be wonderful things, and when a lie is told artfully, if it's done with a degree of craftsmanship, I can't help but admire the liar.

In sixth grade, I made up books to give book reports on.

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

I want to tell more stories about lying, dual lives, self-deception - those are my favorites.

With fiction, I've grown to really love the challenge of lying, the challenge of telling a good tale that isn't truthful, and working with performers is endlessly fascinating. You know, learning what a good performance is, how to get a good performance, how much or how little you need to create emotion or to create character.

The lie, of course, is more interesting.

Writers tell more truths, and more lies, than most.

If you're making it up, make it up good. And then believe in what you made up.

Lies are just another kind of storytelling, but with the very distinct and enlivening motive of desperation. Since writers are by nature desperate creatures, they usually do a pretty good (or pretty awful, but always interesting) job of lying.

A lie was something you told because you were mean or a coward. A story was something you made up out of something that might have happened. Only you didn't tell it like it was, you told it like you thought it should have been.

Falsehood, like the dry-rot, flourishes the more in proportion as air and light are excluded.

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

Truth is not always injured by fiction.