Creative Deception Quotes

Poets themselves, tho' liars by profession, always endeavour to give an air of truth to their fictions.

Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.

I'm a novelist: I spend a great part of my day pretending to myself that I'm in a different world, being a different person, faced with decisions I pretend I haven't created.

the truth is artistically fallacious.

Painting is a lie. It's the most magic of all media, the most transcendent. It makes space where there is no space.

The ordinary true, or purely real, cannot be the object of the arts. Illusion on a ground of truth,--that is the secret of the fine arts.

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

I might work on a painting for a month, but it has too look like I painted it in a minute.

Whenever a great painter... does a work which appears to be false and lying, that falsity is very true.

When I started The Shins, it really was just me, alone, but it was still The Shins. I was totally recording stuff and writing songs as The Shins and all of that. So the beginning inception of the whole thing was some sort of a lie, I guess.

The narrative oftentimes is that everything that comes out of the hood is 'real,' and so I thought, 'I'll base it on the absurd, the not real. I'll twist the idea of real on its head and see if I can get away with it. I'll make paintings that come not from a place but through an abstract gaze.'

I've got a poem that's in a lot of international anthologies called 'After the Anonymous Swedish' and I thought, 'Well, I'm a Swede. I can make up a Swedish poem.' It turned out pretty good.

How poetic you are," she said. "I've a notion that poetry is the highest form of self-deception.

Essentially, we wanted to be in one of Azazel's films, so the notion was we'd simply write an Azazel Jacobs movie ourselves, and then give it to him and be like, 'Right, here's you next film, now direct us. Go.'

Basically, it's somebody who got stuck having to interview me who really wants to be a novelist, so they're writing these novellas and I was like, "It's not true, that didn't happen, they just made all that up! Why don't they just go ahead and be a novelist instead of bothering with interviewing me?"

I knew that the principle objective of my film was to be a sentimental or an emotional study. What I did was kind of like subterfuge.

I think a play can do almost anything, because it's also a static form, much more so than in a movie. In a movie you can move the scenery, you can do anything any way. A cartoon, happens in a limited amount of space and a limited amount of time, and you can only get so many words before the reader's gonna get impatient. All of these forms that I enjoy are in a sense a slight of hand, where you have to suggest much more than you really show. You have to, in a sense, seduce the reader and trick the reader or the audience into going with you.

…I go through a story for lies. I might discover the lie of trying to show off. Sometimes they’re lies of character. Sometimes they are lies of writing the most beautiful sentence in the world that has nothing to do with the story.

Across all of the universe of creative lying, whether you believe in the art of it or the entertainment of it, or both, a certain foundation in the basics allows you to kind of jump out into the unknown.

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

I really don't want to do anything that resembles stand-up comedy. But I will agree to say that I am doing it, and I will hope that people expect it to be that, so I can thwart those expectations.

The truest poetry is the most feigning.

As an actor, I always feel you basically have to be able to delude yourself.

I played cover gigs and traveled the country in my mom's old car, and my drummer and I set up a fake email and sent it out to agents. We pretended to be our own agent.

When I was in art school, there was a stigma attached to coming from comfortable suburbia. If you were from Great Neck, Long Island, you couldn't be a 'real artist', so I found crafty ways of implying that I was from New York.