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

Truth is a good dog; but always beware of barking too close to the heels of an error, lest you get your brains kicked out.

In Japan they prefer the realistic style. They like answers and conclusions, but my stories have none. I want to leave them wide open to every possibility. I think my readers understand that openness.

Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.

Biographies, as generally written, are not only misleading but false… In most instances, they commemorate a lie and cheat posterity out of the truth.

I have two pairs of reading glasses. One pair is for reading fiction, the other for non-fiction. I’ve read the Bible twice wearing each pair, and it’s the same.

I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.

I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud.

You know, my family and friends have never been yes-men: ‚Yes, you’re doing the right thing, you’re always right.‘ No, they tell me when I’m wrong, and that’s why I’ve been able to stay who I am and stay humble.

Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.

Honesty is the best policy – when there is money in it.

Many people tell me that they don ‚t know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That’s good.

As a writer, as a creator, I’m giving you my experiences. But just take what I give you. You ain’t got to pry beyond that.

I hate talking about music, to tell you the truth.

‚Bellyache‘ is totally fictional. I like writing about things that aren’t real. The song is about not trusting anyone and then putting trust in yourself and realizing that you don’t know what you are doing, either. Or realizing that things you do with a group of people that you think are cool in the moment are ultimately all on you.

Faith embraces many truths which seem to contradict each other.

That’s another hallmark of truth, is that it snaps things together. People write to me all the time and say it’s as if things were coming together in my mind. It’s like the Platonic idea that all learning was remembering. You have a nature, and when you feel that nature articulated, it’s it’s like the act of snapping the puzzle pieces together.

It’s all make believe, isn’t it?

If evil be spoken of you and it be true, correct yourself, if it be a lie, laugh at it.

No one can lie, no one can hide anything, when he looks directly into someone’s eyes.

Every hero becomes a bore at last.

Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid.

It is the nature of truth in general, as of some ores in particular, to be richest when most superficial.

Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.

I now possess the tools as a producer and a songwriter to really just go out and make smashes all day long. I could make an album full of smash records that got pop appeal. But my heart is in hip-hop. My heart is in telling stories. And it’s like therapy for me.

The truth is something that burns. It burns off dead wood. And people don’t like having the dead wood burnt off, often because they’re 95 percent dead wood.

We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.

When in doubt tell the truth.

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they were found because it was possible to find them.

There’s no one thing that is true. They’re all true.

There wasn’t much as a kid that inspired me in what I did as an adult, but I was always very interested in what motivates people, and in telling stories and building things.

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

For me, ‚risky‘ is revealing what really happened in my life through music. Risky is writing confessional songs and telling the true story about a person with enough details so everyone knows who that person is.

If I’d written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people – including me – would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

There is some self-interest behind every friendship. There is no friendship without self-interests. This is a bitter truth.

The lie is a condition of life.

Know then this truth, enough for man to know virtue alone is happiness below.

Anger cannot be dishonest.

When I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie. Not, he explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he thought I should know how it’s done so I would recognise when I was being lied to.

I suppose my best attribute, if you want to call it that, is sincerity. I can sell sincerity because that’s the way I am.

I got interested in reading very early, because a story was read to me, by Hans Christian Andersen, which was ‚The Little Mermaid,‘ and I don’t know if you remember ‚The Little Mermaid,‘ but it’s dreadfully sad. The little mermaid falls in love with this prince, but she cannot marry him because she is a mermaid.

To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached, is not in my nature. I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart.

Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fantasies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them.

One tells as few lies as possible only by telling as few lies as possible, and not by having the least possible opportunity to do so.

In fact men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth – often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.

Say not, ‚I have found the truth,‘ but rather, ‚I have found a truth.‘

A special effect is a tool, a means of telling a story. A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing.

Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.

You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year.

Truthful words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not truthful. Good words are not persuasive; persuasive words are not good.

My mind doesn’t work, my memories don’t work like a computer file where I can just retrieve them and, boy, there it is. My mind is selective in terms of memories. When I try to think back to college or high school, there are gaps. I try to fill them in. But I can’t tell you it’s always the truth.

If I’m honest I have to tell you I still read fairy-tales and I like them best of all.

Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories.

There is another old poet whose name I do not now remember who said, ‚Truth is the daughter of Time.‘

I never promise anything. I don’t promise anything to my mum. I don’t promise anything to the supporters.

My days, my years, my life has seen up and downs, lights and darknesses. If I wrote only and continually of the ‚light‘ and never mentioned the other, then as an artist, I would be a liar.

The great quest of life has always been to discover truth.

Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief.

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

Let the future tell the truth, and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments. The present is theirs; the future, for which I have really worked, is mine.