Marcia Muller Quotes

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

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

I've been falsely accused of drawing too much from real life. But I am a petty thief - I take little things. And, I mean, I can hardly write 10 words before I start to make things up. I start to invent, because that's what I want to do. I'm running away to an invented place.

Writers, all the good ones, are Natural Born Liars.

I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.

My greatest qualification for writing fiction was my ability to lie with a straight face as a child.

I think you can do a lot with fiction, and in some cases you can say even more in fiction than you can in straight-up documentary journalism.

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 consider fiction a very high-class form of lying. I enjoy and admire it enormously, but I don't think I'm very good at it.

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

My life isn't very racy or exciting so I make things up, tell stories. I like telling stories.

With non-fiction, there is the struggle to be accurate. With fiction, it is a bit different: the desire to let imagination take you to new places.

When you work at a magazine, you have to tell the truth. When you're not working in that format, it's fun to see where your mind takes you when the dictates have nothing to do with anyone but yourself.

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

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.

Being a writer of fiction isn't like being a compulsive liar, honestly.

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

A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

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

First of all, writing at best - certainly fiction writing - more and more I think is magic.

I'm a storyteller, not a prophet. I'm just interested in a good story.

The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.

Everyone seems quite good at stories and making them up.

Short stories are fiction's R & D department, and failed or less-than-conclusive experiments are not just to be expected but to be hoped for.