Wit & Attitude Quote by Albert Finney

Finney’s line is a neat actor’s paradox: he rejects the moral stink of “lying” while admitting his entire job is structured deception. The trick is how he redefines honesty. Lying, in his framing, isn’t about speaking words that aren’t factually true; it’s about intent to mislead for personal advantage. Acting, by contrast, is a contract. The audience knows you’re pretending, pays you to do it, and judges you on whether the pretense reveals something recognizable. That’s why he can claim, with a straight face, “I always tell the truth” while describing a profession built on make-believe.

There’s also a defensive pride in the cadence: “I mean…” “I don’t…” “I always…” He’s pushing back against the suspicion that performers are inherently slippery people, that public-facing charisma equals private insincerity. Finney’s generation of actors often carried an almost craft-guild seriousness about the work, wary of celebrity culture’s demand for constant self-mythmaking. “I don’t tell tall tales” reads like a refusal of the talk-show persona, the packaged anecdote, the PR-friendly reinvention.

Subtextually, he’s pointing to the strange ethical privilege of performance: you’re allowed to manufacture a self as long as you don’t pretend it’s your real one. His “truth” is emotional accuracy, not biographical confession. In that sense, the quote isn’t coy; it’s a boundary. I’ll give you a convincing illusion, he’s saying, but don’t ask me to fake authenticity offstage.