Sarah Pinborough Quotes

Fiction is able to do one thing better than any other art form: it is able to convey a convincing sense of what is going on in someone else's head. To me, that is the great mystery of life: what is everyone else thinking?

The great thing about 'Allen Gregory' is that we try to make it really questionable that the things he says have happened, have really happened. We like that ambiguity.

I suppose I have a highly developed capacity for self-delusion, so it's no problem for me to believe that I'm somebody else!

I have an idea, and I have a perpetrator, and I write the book along those lines, and when I get to the last chapter, I change the perpetrator so that if I can deceive myself, I can deceive the reader.

I am always at a loss at how much to believe of my own stories.

One of the fun things about unreliable narrators is they can be funny. You can admire things about them and laugh with them.

'Pathological liar' is absolutely the toughest individual to deal with as a psychiatrist. Because you can't take anything they say at face value. And you can't, you know, fill in their personality. You don't know what's real and what's not.

It's been unsettling to discover that every form of narrative, even one that purports to tell the truth, is a kind of lying.

Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.

Don't see the point in reading ghost-written autobiographies, even though some of these published lives may fascinate me. The 'ghost' is always present, manipulating an interview into first-person singular text, and it feels like I'm reading a lie.

You know that if you lie to yourself, surely other people lie to themselves. And if they lie to themselves, they will lie to you also.

Everyone realizes that one can believe little of what people say about each other. But it is not so widely realized that even less can one trust what people say about themselves.

Since a politician never believes what he says, he is surprised when others believe him.

I don't know... I don't think you can trust any of Kurt's characters. That's how Mr. Sutter operates: nothing is what it seems.

I don't mind a narrator who's self-deceiving, but the clues for their truth have to be there for the reader to see.

When the narrator says, 'This is a story without surprises,' most of the time, this is not what happens.

First, unreliability is not the sole preserve of fictional narrators. Second, the pleasure of patting oneself on the back for seizing on instances of unreliability and ignorance is, as the late Frank Kermode may or may not have pointed out, considerable.

'House of Cards' is aiming for truth, not accuracy.

I first read 'Lolita' when I was 16, which I think is a little bit young. But it was a thrilling and disturbing read because it was the first time I really sensed that you could have an unreliable narrator, that you didn't have to sort of tell the truth in a narrative, that there could be something deeper and richer and more complicated going on.

People with psychopathy are very good at reading the minds of their victims. That's probably most clearly seen in deception.

We all get betrayed or we all betray. Life is so complex that it's almost impossible to avoid that. Betrayal is also a critical theme in all the world's great stories. If Christ had not been betrayed, would you have had the resurrection?

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

Trust me, I'm telling you stories. ... I can change the story. I am the story.

Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.

Syn has a brain disorder that causes him to lie most of the time. Ignore him. (Nykyrian)