In the taxi I let my hand lie on her leg like a promise, but I had no intention of keeping my promise.

In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.

Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully.

What an unbearable creature he must have been in those days--and yet in those days he had been comparatively innocent. That was another mystery: it sometimes seemed to him that venial sins--impatience, an unimportant lie, pride, a neglected opportunity--cut you off from grace more completely than the worst sins of all. Then, in his innocence, he had felt no love for anyone; now in his corruption he had learnt.

Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector.

It is the storytellers task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.

It's strange how the human mind swings back and forth, from one extreme to another. Does truth lie at some point of the pendulum's swing, at a point where it never rests, not in the dull perpendicular mean where it dangles in the end like a windless flag, but at an angle, nearer one extreme than another? If only a miracle could stop the pendulum at an angle of sixty degrees, one would believe the truth was there.

He entered the territory of lies without a passport for return.

Lies had deserted me, and I felt as lonely as though they had been my only friends.