Life & Wisdom Quote by Clifford Irving

A “train of lies” is a perfect Irving image: sleek, linear, industrial, and terrifyingly hard to stop once it’s moving. The metaphor does double duty. A train isn’t just fast; it’s committed to a track. You can’t casually drift off course. That’s the subtext of the line’s self-justification: the deception becomes infrastructure. Irving isn’t claiming innocence so much as describing how fraud quickly turns into logistics - timetables, tickets, conductors, witnesses - an entire system that keeps you rolling forward.

The second sentence is where the psychology snaps into focus. “I couldn’t jump off” gestures at fear (you’ll get hurt), cowardice (you don’t want to pay the price), and fatalism (there was never a safe moment). It’s also a quiet admission of complicity disguised as helplessness. He frames the turning point not as a choice to lie, but as an inability to stop lying, shifting the moral weight from intention to momentum. That’s how con artists often narrate themselves: less villain than victim of their own story.

Context makes it bite harder. Irving’s name is welded to the Howard Hughes hoax, a literary scandal built on impersonation, access, and the era’s hunger for exclusive celebrity truth. The line reads like a post-mortem from inside that machinery: once publishers, money, and public anticipation are onboard, the lie stops being a lie and starts being a schedule. The tragedy isn’t that the train was unstoppable. It’s that it was so easy to board.