Active Quote by William Gibson

The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly and at great length. If…

— William Gibson

Novel-writing is a bit like deception. You lie as little as you possibly can. That's the way I do it, anyway.

— Joseph O'Neill

Novelists lie for a living - what is a novel, after all, but an assembly of fibs paradoxically meant to illustrate something true? -…

— Jonathan Miles

Lies are just another kind of storytelling, but with the very distinct and enlivening motive of desperation. Since writers are by nature desperate creatures,…

— John Hodgman

Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.

— Khaled Hosseini

Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.

— Paul Auster

“Novelists congratulate themselves on their creation of this kind of “character” or that kind of “character,” and readers pretend to talk knowingly about “character,”…

— Sōseki Natsume

But the thing is, from the perspective of a novelist there is a brand of lying that feels more honest than the actual facts…

— Ron Currie Jr

“The most dangerous lie we tell ourselves is that writing novels shouldn't feel like a job.”

— Kameron Hurley

“A fiction writer weaves a fabric of lies in hopes of revealing deeper human truths.”

— Wally Lamb

Contrary to all those times you've heard a writer confess at a reading that he writes fiction because he is a pathological liar, fiction…

— Paul Harding

Writers, unlike most people, tell their best lies when they are alone.

— Michael Chabon