Top 100 Writing Lies Quotes
#1. The secret of successful writing lies in striking the right keys on the typewriter.
Evan Esar
#2. I think the whole glory of writing lies in the fact that it forces us out of ourselves and into the lives of others.
Sherwood Anderson
#3. The secret of force in writing lies not so much in the pedigree of nouns and adjectives and verbs, as in having something that you believe in to say, and making the parts of speech vividly conscious of it.
James Russell Lowell
#4. Underneath the visible problems with reading and writing lies the deeper problem of 'illearnacy': an acquired disabling of learning courage and learning initiative.
Guy Claxton
#5. The real joy of writing lies in the opportunity of being able to sacrifice a whole chapter for a single sentence, a complete sentence for a single word...
Jean Baudrillard
#6. More than half the skill of writing lies in tricking the book out of your own head.
Terry Pratchett
#7. The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth.
Criss Jami
#8. A fiction writer weaves a fabric of lies in hopes of revealing deeper human truths.
Wally Lamb
#9. Writers of fiction embellish reality almost without knowing it.
Aljean Harmetz
#10. Getting that first draft out is a horribly hard grind, but that (perversely) is where the joy of it lies.
Jonathan Stroud
#11. Fiction writers, magicians, politicians and priests are the only people rewarded for entertaining us with their lies
Bangambiki Habyarimana
#12. Is not anyone with any degree of mental honesty conscious of telling lies all day long, both in talking and writing, simply because lies will fall into artistic shape when truth will not?
George Orwell
#13. A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. It's a lie if you make something up. But you make it up in the name of the truth, and then you give your heart to expressing it clearly.
Anne Lamott
#14. It's kind of strange- in fiction you get to tell lies and are applauded for it.
Robert James Waller
#15. you come to understand that history might be, as Thomas Carlyle put it, "a distillation of rumor," or, as Napoleon said, "a set of lies generally agreed upon
James Alexander Thom
#16. A novelist's characters must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams. He must learn to hate them and to love them.
Anthony Trollope
#17. In our age, when technology is gaining control over life, when material well-being is considered the most important goal, when the influence of religion has been weakened everywhere in the world, a special responsibility lies upon the writer.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#18. To subvert is not the aim of literature, its value lies in discovering and revealing what is rarely known, little known, thought to be known but in fact not very well known of the truth of the human world. It would seem that truth is the unassailable and most basic quality of literature.
Gao Xingjian
#19. ... 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.
Grace Paley
#21. My resting pulse as a writer is writing idealistically and romantically; aspirationally. My taste lies in quixotic heroes.
Aaron Sorkin
#22. Eternity has no gray hairs. The flowers fade, the heart withers, people grow old and die, the world lies down in the sepulchre of ages, but time writes no wrinkles on the brow of eternity.
Reginald Heber
#23. I sat down to take a break from writing a book and wrote a spec feature that would end up being the movie 'Lies & Alibis' with Steve Coogan.
Noah Hawley
#24. Once you start thinking about the lies people tell when they don't know they're telling them, the truths people reveal when they think they're lying, then you can start to build a world.
Sarah Rees Brennan
#25. The real self of an artiste lies in art, so when an artiste performs, all the pain, trauma and tension get released through art, be it dancing, painting, singing, writing or even martial arts.
Mrinalini Sarabhai
#26. I've always found too that somewhere in whatever you've just written lies the seed of what you're going to write next.
Matthew Specktor
#27. Try to begin things you feel you can do. To begin is enough-there is a boldness in beginning. And in boldness lies genius and magic.
Sir David Baird, 1st Baronet
#28. The truth, or success, of any writer's story lies partly in its specificity and its emotional honesty.
Gail Caldwell
#29. Thinking before writing how I feel. That's how I'm able to write all the lies and wrongs. How else can one write something like a fake smile ?
Muhammad Faizan Khan.
#31. A story isn't a charcoal sketch, where every stroke lies on the surface to be seen. It's an oil painting, filled with layers that the author must uncover so carefully to show its beauty.
Amelia Atwater-Rhodes
#32. Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.
Khaled Hosseini
#33. True alchemy lies in this formula: 'Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse'.
Arthur Rimbaud
#34. Non-fiction can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies.
V.S. Naipaul
#35. You are your greatest product and behind every book lies an author who wrote it.
Geraldine Solon
#36. My only real claim to anyone's attention lies in my writing.
Philip Pullman
#37. To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life.
(Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne, 8 September 1935)
Dorothy L. Sayers
#38. That is the best part of writing: finding the hidden treasures, giving sparkle to worn out events, invigorating the tired soul with imagination, creating some kind of truth with many lies.
Isabel Allende
#39. The personal screenplay- where you dive into the terrifying depths of your soul, unearth the most intimate details about yourself, and put it on paper for the world to see. Proceed with caution, for madness lies ahead.
A.D. Posey
#40. The best writing advice I ever got was "Keep moving forward, don't retreat into rewrites." The worst came from a book that said "Writing fiction is like telling lies," which just seems stupid to me.
David B. Coe
#41. Artists strive for perfection. But what they often fail to see is that the beauty, the humanity, lies within the flaws.
Elizabeth Isaacs
#42. A story unwritten is without beginning or end. But in its potential lies another story; and in the heartbeat before pen meets page, both stories exist at once, reflecting endless permutations of the other, before one of them disappears forever.
Nenia Campbell
#43. In order to write a book, it is necessary to sit down (or stand up) and write. Therein lies the difficulty.
Edward Abbey
#44. Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.
Hilary Mantel
#45. All writing is the same: It's just making up lies until it starts to sound like the truth. That's what I do.
Brian K. Vaughan
#46. It's true that I have very little idea what I shall be writing next, but at the same time I have a powerful premonition of everything that lies ahead of me, even ten years ahead.
J.G. Ballard
#47. If I cannot be myself in what I write, then the whole is nothing but lies and humbug.
Henrik Ibsen
#48. Everyone lies about writing. They lie about how easy it is or how hard it was. They perpetuate a romantic idea that writing is some beautiful experience that takes place in an architectural room filled with leather novels and chai tea.
Amy Poehler
#49. Regardless of the popular literary trend of the times, write the thing which lies close to your heart.
Bess Streeter Aldrich
#50. What power--what importance--lies in the blank lines of an open notebook. Go and fill yours. Then share.
Penny Kittle
#51. Mostly it's lies, writing novels. You set out to tell an untrue story and you try to make it believable, even to yourself. Which calls for details; any good lie does.
Anne Tyler
#52. If I had to refute all the other articles of the Jewish faith, I should be obliged to write against them as much and for as long a time as they have used for inventing their lies- that is, longer than two thousand years.
Martin Luther
#53. Sometimes you have to tell a a bunch of lies to get at the truth.
Stella Atrium
#54. Mr. Robertson Davies has also suggested in his Deptford Trilogy that the same great truism which applies to writing, painting, picking horses at the track, and telling lies in a sincerely believable way, also applies to magic: some people got the knack, and some people don't. Hilly didn't.
Stephen King
#55. Settings are obviously important - and as a writer, you have to respect what was real at the time of the story you're writing. But the real key to success lies in finding the right characters to carry that story.
Joan Lingard
#56. The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly and at great length. If not for our excessive vanity and our over-active imaginations, novelists might be unusually difficult to deceive.
William Gibson
#57. Fiction writing is a strange business when you think about it. You sit down and weave a network of lies to explore deeper truths.
Wally Lamb
#58. The challenge - and much of the fun - of writing in an established future history lies in incorporating new knowledge while remaining true to what has gone before. Expanding and enriching, not contradicting.
Edward M. Lerner
#59. I shall not be deterred by people who don't see where the future of Africa lies. It is the short-sighted people who put their opinions in writing. They don't understand that the future of all countries lies in processing.
Yoweri Museveni
#60. Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos ... to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.
John Cheever
#61. I thought with melancholy how an author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart's blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do.
W. Somerset Maugham
#62. Nobody wants to be a part of your story. Everybody wants you to elaborate on their fantasies.
Michael Bassey Johnson
#63. A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.
Tim O'Brien
#64. We can't write a serious novel in the 21st century without acknowledging the inescapable self-awareness we're stuck with. The idea we're surrounded by falsehoods and lies. It's hard for the thinking person to believe in narratives. And yet we want some place to invest our belief.
Michael Helm
#65. There's a difference between the 'art' of writing and the 'craft' of writing. Art is subjective, its beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, but craft is objective. There is a right way and a wrong way to craft.
Gerard De Marigny
#66. A woman's writing is always feminine; it cannot help being feminine; at its best it is most feminine; the only difficulty lies in defining what we mean by feminine.
Virginia Woolf
#67. If you're gonna write, for God in heaven's sake, try to get naked. Try to write the truth. Try to get underneath all the sham, all the excuses, all the lies that you've been told.
Harry Crews
#68. I can taste fear, and lies, on a man's skin, Cavrax." The Master Priest whispered, watching the large pulse on the cleric's neck beat like a caged thing begging for release. "You're lying to me.
C.N. Faust
#69. The Kafka paradox: art depends on truth, but truth, being indivisable, cannot know itself: to tell the truth is to lie. thus the writer is the truth, and yet when he speaks he lies.
Franz Kafka
#70. Of writing well, be sure, the secret lies
In wisdom :therefore study to be wise.
Horace
#71. Perhaps one day someone from a distant land will listen to this story of mine. Isn't this what lies behind the desire to be inscribed in the pages of a book? Isn't it just for the sake of this delight that sultans and viziers proffer bags of gold to have their histories written?
Orhan Pamuk
#72. The core of character lies in each individual story person's ability to care about something; to feel implicitly or explicitly that something is important.
Dwight V. Swain
#73. He was after all, a novelist ... and a novelist was simply a fellow who got paid to tell lies. The bigger the lies, the better the pay.
Stephen King
#74. It should be an explosion of truth. Its strength lies in what it leaves out just as much as what it puts in, if not more.
William Trevor
#75. Never believe anything a writer tells you about himself. A man comes to believe in the end the lies he tells himself about himself.
George Bernard Shaw
#76. Lying in small doses makes a good storyteller great.
Bryan Way
#77. She asked me the definition of beauty. So I told her name in my reply!
Avijeet Das
#78. The most lies we will ever tell in our lives will be to ourselves.
Carla H. Krueger
#79. CEMETERY, n. An isolated suburban spot where mourners match lies, poets write at a target and stone-cutters spell for a wager.
Ambrose Bierce
#80. In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.
Lauren Groff
#81. As a writer, I am an intellectual. I believe in the ideals of the Enlightenment, I believe in the written word, in dialogue and in truth. I hate lies more than anything else. Most of the time I react by writing.
Henning Mankell
#82. I think the mystery of art lies in this, that artists' relationship is essentially with their work - not with power, not with profit, not with themselves, not even with their audience.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#83. No, I don't harbor any mystical ideas about writing, Your Honor, it's work like any other kind of craft; the power of literature, I've always thought, lies in how willful the act of making it is.
Nicole Krauss
#84. Everything I write is sinful, full of lies, especially the big one, the one you go to hell for: pretending not to be a fool.
Sallie Tisdale
#85. Contextualization lies in bringing out the right messages from the abundant content; in sandwiching the subject between the background of information and the foreground of its utility.
Suyog Ketkar
#87. If you are at the mercy of what they call print interviews and the mercy of people who write about you, they can always tell lies.
Gore Vidal
#88. The success of the documentation efforts lies in the users being able to correctly locate and use the resolutions to their issues on time and retain that knowledge for later use.
Suyog Ketkar
#89. There's an expression, "God is in the details," and it applies to nothing more than it does to the writing of fiction. To that and to the art of telling good lies. And what is fiction but the telling of lies?
Donna Levin
#90. The desire to confess ... lies at the root of most fiction writing ...
Lucy Poate Stebbins
#91. Novels are just very, very, very long lies. That is to say, you've got to get your story straight!
Blair Thornburgh
#92. That's how it is for us servants. No one pays you much heed; mostly you're invisible as furniture. Yet you overhear a conversation here, and add a little gossip there. A writing desk lies open and you cannot help but read a paper. Then you find something, something you should not have found ...
Martine Bailey
#94. Fiction is lies; we're writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. But it has to have a truth at the core of it.
George R R Martin
#95. He reflected. 'I know a lot of different kids of people; what I want is to show each of them how the others really are. You hear so many lies!
Simone De Beauvoir
#96. Be warned, reader. Once seen, something cannot be unseen and once read, something cannot be unread. What lies ahead can be the future of spirit but the future of spirit can also be what lies inside your head.
S.A. Tawks
#97. He sits with the pen in his hand, holding himself back from a descent into representations that have no place in the world, on the point of toppling, enclosed within a moment in which all creations lies open at his feet, the moment before he loosens his grip and begins to fall.
J.M. Coetzee
#98. Truths are dangerous," he said.
"Then why are you writing them in a book?"
"To catch them between the pages," said Teddy, "and trap them before they disappear.
Kristin Cashore
#99. There is a rule for fantasy writers: The more truth you mix in with a lie, the stronger it gets.
Diane Duane
#100. Lie. Put down on paper the most interesting lies you can imagine ... and then make them plausible.
Chris Bohjalian
