When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer.

When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I'm a grown up, they call me a writer.

I don’t know why dishonesty has always gotten under my skin. My parents taught me to tell the truth, but come on, whose parents didn’t? Well, okay, maybe Trump’s. The point is, I don’t know where exactly my particular obsession with lies and lying liars came from. And I admit, it’s a little weird. Part of it may be that I’ve always been an incredibly literal person.

I don’t know about lying for novelists. I look at some of the great novelists, and I think the reason they are great is that they’re telling the truth. The fact is they’re using made-up names, made-up people, made-up places, and made-up times, but they’re telling the truth about the human being — what we are capable of, what makes us lose, laugh, weep, fall down, and gnash our teeth and wring our hands and kill each other and love each other.

An experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often quite picturesque liar.

I’m a liar, but an honest one. People reproach me for not always telling the same story in the same way. But this happens because I’ve invented the whole tale from the start and it seems boring to me and unkind to other people to repeat myself.

"Truth is a well-known pathological liar. It invariably turns out to be Fiction wearing a fancy frock. Self-proclaimed Fiction, on the other hand, is entirely honest. You can tell this, because it comes right out and says, "I'm a Liar," right there on the dust jacket."

I now make the only true statement you are to expect – that I am a liar. This confession is, I consider, a full defence against all imputations. My subject is, then, what I have neither seen, experienced, nor been told, what neither exists nor could conceivably do so. I humbly solicit my readers' incredulity.

Truth is a well-known pathological liar. It invariably turns out to be Fiction wearing a fancy frock. Self-proclaimed Fiction, on the other hand, is entirely honest. You can tell this, because it comes right out and says, "I'm a Liar," right there on the dust jacket.

I always used to say strongly that I was not an autobiographical writer, so strongly it was clearly suspicious…Even without this book, I can now say that is just a lie.

You lie; you always were a liar, and you always will be a liar.

Children's lies are signs of great talent.

Few of us are murderers or thieves, but we have all been liars.

People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars.