Amitava Kumar 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.

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

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

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

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 make it all up, and all of it is true.

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.'

Lying and art are very allied. But after you lie, you get to the truth.

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

In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.

As writers, it is our job not only to imagine, but to witness.

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

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

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

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.

It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

As a novelist, I ask of myself only that I tell the truth and that I tell it beautifully.

Surely the job of fiction is to actually tell the truth. It's a paradox that's at the heart of any kind of storytelling.

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

It's no sin to tell a good story.

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

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.