Agatha Christie on Truth

"Never do I deceive you, Hastings. I only permit you to deceive yourself."

"How true is the saying that man was forced to invent work in order to escape the strain of having to think."

"Understand this, I mean to arrive at the truth. The truth, however ugly in itself, is always curious and beautiful to seekers after it."

"“Me, I am convinced it is the truth,” said M. Bouc, becoming more and more enamoured of his theory."

"“You do well. Method and order, they are everything,” replied Poirot."

"Oh dear, I never realized what a terrible lot of explaining one has to do in a murder!"

"I did not deceive you, mon ami. At most, I permitted you to deceive yourself."

"If you confront anyone who has lied with the truth, they usually admit it — often out of sheer surprise. It is only necessary to guess right to produce your effect."

"I can imagine anything! That's the trouble with me. I can imagine things now — this minute. I could even make them sound all right, but of course none of them would be true."

"It's as easy to utter lies as truth."

"Men always tell such silly lies."

"‘Truth of it is,’ said Commander Haydock, steering rather erratically round a one-way island and narrowly missing collision with a large van, ‘when the beggars are right, one remembers it, and when they’re wrong you forget it.’"

"There were to be no short cuts to the truth. Instead he would have to adopt a longer, but a reasonably sure method. There would have to be conversation. Much conversation. For in the long run, either through a lie, or through truth, people were bound to give themselves away..."

"Once I went professionally to an archaeological expedition--and I learnt something there. In the course of an excavation, when something comes up out of the ground, everything is cleared away very carefully all around it. You take away the loose earth, and you scrape here and there with a knife until finally your object is there, all alone, ready to be drawn and photographed with no extraneous matter confusing it. That is what I have been seeking to do--clear away the extraneous matter so that we can see the truth--the naked shining truth."