However I don't believe the statement was meant to be taken entirely literally.
I agree that fewer lines of code is better, unfortunately if you hold that concept in too high a regard it's easy to make a mess. Some programming challenges are complex and the complexity can't be avoided. Sometimes solving that problem in fewer lines of code makes the problem even more complex. Just because the complexity is moving from the code itself into the developers head doesn't NECESSARILY mean that it will be less prone to bugs.
Sometimes people work too hard to make two functions with slightly different objectives into a single complicated function. This can save lines of code since you aren't writing two similar functions. In general this is good practice but it's VERY common to take this too far, and it's very likely that the resulting complicated function will be MORE prone to bugs than the two simpler functions would have been.