David Hume Quotes

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

Poetry lies its way to the truth.

All writing is the same: It's just making up lies until it starts to sound like the truth. That's what I do.

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

I'm a poet, and I like my lies the way my mother used to make them.

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

If you want to become a man of letters and perhaps write some Histories one day, you must also lie and invent tales, otherwise your History would become monotonous. But you must act with restraint. The world condemns liars who do nothing but lie, even about the most trivial things, and it rewards poets, who lie only about the greatest things.

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

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

I am a writer, which means I write stories, I write novels, and I would write poetry if I knew how to. I don't want to limit myself.

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

Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

Telling ourselves that fiction is in a sense true and at the same time not true is essential to the art of fiction. It's been at the heart of fiction from the start. Fiction offers both truth, and we know it's a flat-out lie. Sometimes it drives a novelist mad. Sometimes it energizes us.

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

The poet nothing affirmeth and therefore never lieth.

I can't speak for readers in general, but personally I like to read stories behind which there is some truth, something real and above all, something emotional. I don't like to read essays on literature; I don't like to read critical or rational or impersonal or cold disquisitions on subjects.

It's no sin to tell a good story.

Fiction has a unique role in conveying Truth. In fact, only fiction that is Truth with a capital T is worthwhile.

I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts.

When I was a kid, I got in trouble for lying a lot, and I had a teacher say, 'Instead of lying, write it down, because if you write it down, it's not a lie anymore; it's fiction.'

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

The art of writing fiction is to sail as dangerously close to the truth as possible without sinking the ship

If you get bored with nothing to do, you are not a writer ... We are in the business of reproducing reality from nothing. We are the biggest liars in the world, seeking truth.

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

What is a writer of fiction but a liar with a licence?