Daniel Keyes Quotes

Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself -- in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity -- is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them.

Thus 'tis with all; their chief and constant care Is to seem everything but what they are.

Affectation hath always had a greater share both in the action and discourse of men than truth and judgment have.

I grew up with the idealistic notion that writing and literature were noble causes. I had no inkling, no sense of what I would eventually encounter in terms of people who weren't being sincere. I'm not saying that it happens always or a lot, but it happens enough that sometimes it makes me feel a little queasy.

If you want to say something and have people listen then you have to wear a mask. If you want to be honest then you have to live a lie.

There is none who does not lie hourly in the respect he pays to false appearance.

Hypocrisy in anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wide-awake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it may be disguised.

Everybody is full of crap. The coin of the realm is being full of crap. The best people - being full of crap are our leaders and our superstars.

Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.

In our lives in a lot of ways it's all about fake. You've got people wanting things for fake reasons.

The American people are tired of liars and people who pretend to be something they're not.

We can love an honest rogue, but what is more offensive than a false saint?

It’s better to be quotable than to be honest.

Be a hypocrite if you like, but don't talk like one.

I don't like Drake as a person. He's just fake to me.

We're against hypocrisy, lies, bigotry, show business, insincerity, phonies, and fakers.

I just don't have a tolerance for people being fake, I don't think. Maybe especially when I think they have bad intentions.

I can't stand fake people. I can feel it when someone feigns it.

You become uneasy with people in direct proportion to how many lies you have to keep track of in their presence.

Dissimulation creeps gradually into the minds of men.

There are innumerable instances suggesting that modern intellectuals do not believe themselves, that they don't really believe what they say, that they say certain things only in order to assure themselves that they possess opinions and ideas that are different from those that are entertained by the common herd of men.

Ceremony and great professing renders friendship as much suspect as it does religion.

There is no more dangerous experiment than that of undertaking to be one thing before a man's face and another behind his back.

Cottages have them (falsehood and dissimulation) as well as courts, only with worse manners.

It may be just one facet of your personality, or it may not even be a facet but only a pretension. You can show this false face with no problem when sometimes you meet on a sea beach, sometimes in a garden, sometimes under the moon and the stars, but when you really start living together then the reality starts surfacing. The real person is a hell and all that sweet talk that had happened under the stars becomes just lies.