Unreliable Narrator Quotes

A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else.

Since a politician never believes what he says, he is surprised when others believe him.

I think six seasons are telling us one thing about 'Game of Thrones': Everyone should watch their back. No one is safe. That's what I love about the show. I love that it's so unpredictable.

The funny response to 'One Mississippi' continues to be that people don't know what is true and what's fiction.

Truth disappears with the telling of it.

I am always at a loss at how much to believe of my own stories.

I have come to the conclusion that Ben Carson is a bit nuts. I say that not because I disagree with him politically, but because he doesn't seem to know what the truth is.

In my long experience, one thing I know is that truth is elusive.

… facts are like cows. If you stare them in the face hard enough, they generally run away.

Everything I tell you is a lie." -Vergere

One difference between film noir and more straightforward crime pictures is that noir is more open to human flaws and likes to embed them in twisty plot lines.

I always wanted to write psychological thrillers.

I cringe at backstory. Because it never quite explains or gets into some psychological thing that is never quite right and never quite the truth and who knows why someone is some way.

Memory is not particularly linear - it is associative, repetitive, subjective and porous. But the writer needs to convey disorder and dysfunction without making the novel itself disorderly or dysfunctional.

Plus, according to my mother, memories change like people do, especially if there's enough alcohol involved-Aphrodite

Everyone realizes that one can believe little of what people say about each other. But it is not so widely realized that even less can one trust what people say about themselves.

When the reader and one narrator know something the other narrator does not, the opportunities for suspense and plot development and the shifting of reader sympathies get really interesting.

Perfect objectivity is always impossible, no matter who writes a person's biography.

I can't stand characters with contradictory information.

I think first-person narrators should be complex, because otherwise the first-person is too shallow and predictable. I like a first-person narrator who can't totally be trusted.

If you see voters as rational, you'll be a terrible politician. People are not wired to be rational. Our brains simply evolved to keep us alive. Brains did not evolve to give us truth. Brains merely give us movies in our minds that keeps us sane and motivated. But none of it is rational or true, except maybe sometimes by coincidence.

Reading Dorothy B. Hughes's novel 'In a Lonely Place' for the first time is like finding the long-lost final piece to an enormous puzzle. Within its Spanish bungalows, its eucalyptus-scented shadows, you feel as though you've discovered a delicious and dark secret, a tantalizing page-turner with sneakily subversive undercurrents.

I write unreliable narrators because - paradoxically - they're the most honest, true-to-life kind there is.

The best crime novels are all based on people keeping secrets. All lying - you may think a lie is harmless, but you put them all together and there's a calamity.

I don't know... I don't think you can trust any of Kurt's characters. That's how Mr. Sutter operates: nothing is what it seems.