Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.
The camera cannot lie. But it can be an accessory to untruth.
The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.
The essence of lying is in deception, not in words.
We deceive and flatter no one by such delicate artificies as we do our own selves.
Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.
We're actors. We're the opposite of people.
talent to hoodwink the blind, and with a facility of speech well calculated to deceive the ignorant …
Abraham Lincoln is a man with
Art lies because it's social.
Not to discover weakness is The Artifice of strength.
You have to live with the people in hypocrisy for them to stay happy with you.
MAGIC, n. An art of converting superstition into coin. There are other arts serving the same high purpose, but the discreet lexicographer does not name them.
Films are always pretentious. There's nothing more pretentious than a filmmaker.
What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying.
It's a vain craft, acting.
The worst crime is faking it.
I know that some people view me as a bit manufactured. But I can't be Whitney Houston: somebody who is polite and perfect and appeals to your mother and your grandfather.
Cunning leads to knavery. It is but a step from one to the other, and that very slippery. Only lying makes the difference; add that to cunning, and it is knavery.
Humility is often merely feigned submissiveness assumed in order to subject others, an artifice of pride which stoops to conquer, and although pride has a thousand ways of transforming itself it is never so well disguised and able to take people in as when masquerading as humility.
The art of pleasing is the art of deception.
Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you'll find the real tinsel underneath.
I think it's obvious when you're watching a movie, and there's people fighting or someone's slipping on the side of the building, that it's fake and it really removes you from it.
You cannot play naive if you're not.
I'm always so impressed with these actresses with their perfect make up and hair and sometimes I'm very aware that I'm not like that. But I don't think I can do things any other way. I would be wearing a disguise if I started to apply that stuff.
The reason I don't like realist, photorealist, neorealist, or whatever, is that I am as interested in the artificial as I am in the real.
