"Sooner or later we've all got to let go of our past."
— Dan Brown (Deception Point)

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

"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!"
— L. Frank Baum (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz)

"Later, when she sees the photographs for the first time, she will be surprised at how calm her face looks - how steady her gaze, how erect her posture. In the picture her eyes will be slightly closed, and there will be a shadow on her neck. The shawl will be draped around her shoulders, and her hands will rest in her lap. In this deceptive photograph, she will look a young woman who is not at all disturbed or embarrassed, but instead appears to be rather serious. And she wonders if, in its ability to deceive, photography is not unlike the sea, which may offer a benign surface to the observe even as it conceals depths and current below."
— Anita Shreve (Fortune's Rocks: A Novel)

"Her words were like tinfoil; they shone and they covered things up."
— Helen Cross (My Summer of Love)

"'I am not good at deception,' said Tuesday gloomily, flushing.
'Right, my boy, right,' said the President with a ponderous heartiness, 'You aren't good at anything.'"
— G.K. Chesterton (The Man Who Was Thursday)

"Warfare is the way of deception."
— Sunzi (The art of war)

"Nothing could be taken for granted. Women who loved you tried to cut your throat, while women who didn't even know your name scrubbed your back. Witches could sound like Katharine Hepburn and your best friend could try to strangle you. Smack in the middle of an orchid there might be a blob of jello and inside a Mickey Mouse doll, a fixed and radiant star."
— Toni Morrison (Song of Solomon)

"A man when he is making up to anybody can be cordial and gallant and full of little attentions and altogether charming. But when a man is really in love he can't help looking like a sheep."
— Agatha Christie (TRAIN BLEU (LE) : FAC SIMILE)

"Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues."
— Thomas Hobbes

"Many things are not as they seem: The worst things in life never are."
— Jim Butcher (White Night)

"Almost all people are hypnotics. The proper authority saw to it that the proper belief should be induced, and the people believed properly."
— Charles Fort

"Who would appreciate such candor? No one. None of us really likes honesty. We prefer deception –but only when it is unabashedly flattering or artfully camouflaged. Groups seem to need to believe that they are superior to others and that they have a purpose greater than just passing along their genes to the next generation. Individuals seem to need similar delusions – about who they are and why they do what they do. They need heroes, however fraudulent… Studies show that people are more likely to accept the opinion of a confident con man than the cautious view of someone who actually knows what he is talking about. And professionals who form overconfident opinions on the basis of incorrect readings of the facts are more likely to succeed than their more competent peers who display greater doubt.

What’s more, deception works best, according to studies by psychologists, when the person doing the deceiving is fool enough to be deceived, too; that is, when he believes his own lies. That is why incompetent leaders – who are naïve enough to fall for their own guff – are such a danger to civilized life. If they are modern leaders, they must also delude themselves into thinking they know how to make the world a better place. Invariably, the answers they propose to problems are ones that bubble up from their own vanity, the essence of which is to make the rest of the world look just like them!"
— William Bonner (Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politics)

"There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.
"
— Arthur Conan Doyle

" "I'll say this, Arik: the old man's warning proved to be true - things are not always what they seem. She was no young lady -"
"If it's the demon you speak of," interjected Rith, as she stepped back into the ruin, Lyssa following after, "she was not even a toothless old hag.""
— Dennis L. McKiernan (Caverns of Socrates)