Shirley Jackson Quotes

Novel-writing is a bit like deception. You lie as little as you possibly can. That's the way I do it, anyway.

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.

Lie. Put down on paper the most interesting lies you can imagine. . .and then make them plausible.

The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length.

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

The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them; he exhausts the possibilities of his characters.

Acting is like lying. The art of lying well. I'm paid to tell elaborate lies.

What do you do in a novel? You take recognizable characters from your own life, and you fantasize about what they're really like.

Writers of fiction, when they begin, are more likely to try the short form.

I'm a novelist: I spend a great part of my day pretending to myself that I'm in a different world, being a different person, faced with decisions I pretend I haven't created.

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up.

It's no sin to tell a good story.

I'm a believer in using whatever works for fiction, but mostly, that's not life.

I want to be seen as a good storyteller. I'm a manipulator as well.

A good novel is a good novel, pointe finale. And I think what I'm writing is exactly that.

I have tried very hard as a novelist to say, 'Novels are about individuals and especially larger than life individuals.'

Novel-writing is, for the novelist, a game of let's pretend.

Fiction comes in all shapes and sizes. Secrets,lies,stories. We all tell them. Sometimes,because we hope to entertain. Sometimes,because we need to distract. And sometimes, because we have to.

The lie, of course, is more interesting.

It’s not a lie. It’s a gift for fiction.

It's kind of strange-- in fiction you get to tell lies and are applauded for it.

All fiction is a process of imagining: whatever you write, in whatever genre or medium, your task is to make things up convincingly and interestingly and new.

Le mensonge et les vers de tout temps sont amis. Lies and literature have always been friends.

That's the trouble with a story spinner. You never know what's real and what's made up. Even when they are telling the truth, they can't stop themselves from spinning it into something better; something prettier, with more of a pattern to it.