I do write a lot from personal experience, but I also embellish a bit.
I know that two and two make four - and should be glad to prove it too if I could - though I must say if by any sort of process I could convert 2 and 2 into five it would give me much greater pleasure.
So I wasn't lying, exactly. I was just choosing among truths.
I think people bend the truth all the time, unfortunately.
It’s not a lie. It’s a gift for fiction.
The great thing about fiction is that you can start off by telling the truth, then start making stuff up like crazy whenever you feel like it.
We are being very nomadic with the truth, yes?
I have no problem twisting the facts if it's the only way I can be true to the moment.
You have to be a bit of a liar to tell a story the right way.
As if there could be true stories: things happen in one way, and we retell them in the opposite way.
When you're on the side of the angels, it's easier to stretch the truth.
[Richard Cheney is] an unabashed bender of the truth.
There is hardly any man so strict as not to vary a little from truth when he is to make an excuse.
Narrating incredible things as though they were real old system; narrating realities as though they were incredible the new.
I found that if I stack the moments correctly, people will believe in the most outrageous things.
Christopher discovered that you dealt with obnoxious masters and most older boys the way you dealt with governesses: you quite politely told them the truth in the way they wanted to hear it, so that they thought they had won and left you in peace.
A lot of times, I have personal things, things I go through that I may exaggerate or make a story around, but it always has a meaning related to something I've been through for real.
If you need to fudge the facts a little bit to make your narrative work, there is nothing anyone can do to stop you.
I like to write about real people, real crimes. But what has increasingly come to interest me, and also appear to me as a challenge, is the idea of doing strange things with what is real. Take what is real and make it more or less real.
It's kind of strange-- in fiction you get to tell lies and are applauded for it.
