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

I have suffered most of the things I write about – or my friends have.

All my stories are like the Greek and Roman myths, and the Egyptian myths, and the Old and New Testament.

I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.

Storytelling is about two things; it’s about character and plot.

Why should poetry have to make sense?

Where sense is wanting, everything is wanting.

I have never entered into any controversy in defense of my philosophical opinions; I leave them to take their chance in the world. If they are right, truth and experience will support them; if wrong, they ought to be refuted and rejected. Disputes are apt to sour one’s temper and disturb one’s quiet.

Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.

Peace if possible, truth at all costs.

I never start out with any kind of connecting theme or plan. Everything just falls the way it falls. I don’t ever think about what kind of fiction I write or what I am writing about or what I am trying to write about. When I’m writing, what I do is I think about a story that I want to tell.

The passive aggressive arguer comes armed with tricky tactics. They cannot take the risk that they might be wrong: their self-esteem is too intertwined with their opinions. It is more important to affirm their rightness, and sense of superiority, than to arrive at the truth.

Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.

Fools admire, but men of sense approve.

Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

The truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects.

Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth.

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.

I know that campaigns can seem small, and even silly. Trivial things become big distractions. Serious issues become sound bites. And the truth gets buried under an avalanche of money and advertising. If you’re sick of hearing me approve this message, believe me – so am I.

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

The thing about delirium is you think it’s great, but it actually isn’t.

I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.

I’m never a reliable narrator, unbiased or objective.

If you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.

Richard Nixon is a no good, lying bastard. He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, and if he ever caught himself telling the truth, he’d lie just to keep his hand in.

By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth.

Truth never damages a cause that is just.

Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.

Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.

The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.

I went to see ‚Phantom of the Opera‘ with my grandma and my mom when I was very little. The stage, the voice, the music… Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber has been a massive inspiration to me for some time – the storytelling, that deliciously somber undertone in his music.

When we value correct principles, we have truth – a knowledge of things as they are.

Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.

I’m a fantasy writer, called a fantasy writer. But there’s very little, apart from one or two basic concepts in ‚I Shall Wear Midnight,‘ which are in fact fantasy. You have sticks that fly, but they’re practical broomsticks, with a bloody great strap that you can hold on to so you don’t fall off. And you try not to use them too often.

Every hero becomes a bore at last.

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.

There is no unique picture of reality.

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

So near is falsehood to truth that a wise man would do well not to trust himself on the narrow edge.

The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.

The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

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.

We often want one thing and pray for another, not telling the truth even to the gods.

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.

Maybe I should say that memory interests me a great deal, because I think we all tell stories of our lives to ourselves as well as to other people. Well, women do, anyway. Women do this a lot. And I think when men get older, they do this too, but maybe in slightly different terms.

Truth is weirder than any fiction I’ve seen.

I never saw any of my dad’s stories. My mother said he had piles and piles of manuscripts.

I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don’t obey the rules of progression for novels. I don’t think about a particular form: I think more about fiction, let’s say a chunk of fiction.

Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.

To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!

I wrote a few children’s books… not on purpose.

Falsehood is cowardice, the truth courage.

I know now that there is no one thing that is true – it is all true.

We occasionally stumble over the truth but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth.

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.

The truth is lived, not taught.

They’ve got this crazy actor who’s 82 years old up there in a suit. I was a mayor, and they’re probably thinking I know how to give a speech, but even when I was mayor I never gave speeches. I gave talks.