unreliable narration Quotes

Memory is like fiction; or else it's fiction that's like memory. This really came home to me once I started writing fiction, that memory seemd a kind of fiction, or vice versa. Either way, no matter how hard you try to put everything neatly into shape, the context wanders this way and that, until finally the context isn't even there anymore... Warm with life, hopeless unstable.

So much about Trump is... mysterious and slippery. Everything in his business record, you had to ask him for the details. He made himself the only source. He would either not tell you, or he was often an unreliable narrator about his own life.

Memory is a great artist. For every man and for every woman it makes the recollection of his or her life a work of art and an unfaithful record.

I'm so suspicious of our own understanding of the past. I just think that your mind plays absolute tricks on you and fools you every minute of every day. And so when you're talking about the past, you're talking about something that never happened. At least it didn't happen the way you think it happened.

History is the study of lies, anyway, because no witness ever recalls events with total accuracy, not even eyewitnesses.

In general, in all my films, I choose to create a certain mistrust, rather than claiming that what I'm showing onscreen is an accurate reproduction of reality. I want people to question what they are seeing onscreen. In the same way as I used the narrator, I also used black and white, because it creates a distance toward what's being seen. I see the film as an artifact rather than a reliable reconstruction of a reality that we cannot know.

It's beyond the grasp of anyone's memory to recall conversations in kind of [memoir] detail. So it's fake. It's all made up.

Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak.

I never knew a man could tell so many lies, he had a different story for every set of eyes. How can he remember who he's talking to?

Well, I always talk about how I used to work at an insane asylum and stuff, which is true, but to be honest, I just make crap up more than anything else.

I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It's awful. If I'm on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I'm going, I'm liable to say I'm going to the opera. It's terrible.

Jon lied ... loudly, as if that could make it true.

The unreliable narrator is an odd concept. The way I see it, we're all unreliable narrators of our lives who usually have absolute trust in our self-told stories. Any truth is, after all, just a matter of perspective.

But mostly they were lies I told; it wasn't my fault, I couldn't remember, because it was as though I'd been to one of those supernatural castles visited by characters in legends: once away, you do not remember, all that is left is the ghostly echo of haunting wonder.

A false tale often betrays itself.

There's a lot of bullshit in Peter Fonda's autobiography. A great deal of it is complete fabrication.

There's something uniquely exhilarating about puzzling together the truth at the hands of an unreliable narrator.

It seems too easy to lie in the moment but you always have to tell more lies on top of it to cover your tracks.

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.