People who are untruthful in a character-driven way, whose discourse (spoken or written, or perhaps visual) is not aimed-at correspondence with reality - seem to fall into two categories: fantasist and liar.
A fantasist is not truthful because he is not aiming at truth, but at something else - perhaps entertainment, humour, or even art.
Humour is a good example - a good "raconteur" tells anecdotes of his life; but these stories do not attempt to describe accurately the individual's past experience.
Instead, some aspects or fragments of past experience are used as the basis for elaborating a fantasy - and the aim may be humour, or to thrill, to horrify - or otherwise engage with his audience.
The liar, on the other hand, is untruthful for his own benefit.
If a liar tells an entertaining story, its subtext is intentionally (whether by conscious intent, or by sheer habit) self-aggrandisement.
The liar's untruthfulness is motivated by self-interest: the lie is to serve a selfish agenda.
When there is anecdote, when the liar spins something that seems like a fantasy; the underlying objective is always to impress the audience with a conviction of "Nonetheless... What a fine fellow he is!"
The true fantasist can be distinguished by the self-deprecating nature of his stories.
I used to know a vastly entertaining Welsh chap, who spontaneously extemporized hilarious stories of his own experiences (to the extent of making me cry with helpless laughter) - and always with the assumption of himself as a hapless character, his own worst enemy.
Of course these stories were 95% untrue in a literal sense - yet, they always had some actual observation or event as a trigger, and evoked a surreal sense of reality that made them compelling, and almost wise.
Of course, to be able to tell funny stories against oneself requires a deep self-confidence, which is attractive.
And in a deeper sense, the successful fantasist does project a positive image; at least some of the audience will assume that anybody who is so confident that he can afford to run himself down continually, must underneath it all be pretty confident after all.
This applies even when a self-deprecating fantasist really is a kind of walking disaster zone IRL; as seems to have been the case with Michael Green, author of "The Art of Coarse..." series of books (e.g. Coarse Rugby, Acting, Sailing, Drinking etc) and his two excellent autobiographies*.
By all accounts, Michael Green really was a kind of walking disaster area, a bit of a "dope"; and continually self-sabotaging. He was, therefore, just the kind of well-meaning but hapless innocent that he described himself to be. His fantasies seem to have had a higher-than-usual percentage of literal factuality!
Yet of course Green was also a successful and much-loved humourist over several decades - therefore clearly an unusually competent kind of "fool".
When you laugh at Michael Green's crazy exploits, it is Michael Green who is making you laugh.
By contrast, the liar's aim is to manipulate his audience in ways that benefit himself.
Sometimes this is crudely done, a Hard Sell, that brow-beats and wearies his audience.
(As when the liar is so insecure that he cannot bear, even for a moment, to threaten his own precious self-image.)
Or sometimes the liar may seek to emulate the self-deprecation of a fantasist - taking the long-termist and Soft Sell approach to marketing.
But whether Hard of Soft, the Liar is always selling himself - because, at root, "himself" is the only thing he really cares about.
**
*The boy who shot down an airship (1988), and Nobody hurt in small earthquake (1990).
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