Quotes About Reality

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

I make documentaries from time to time to remind myself of reality. It's like musicians doing scales to keep their fingers working: when you're in the street, listening to people, you're forced to be in the service of your subject.

Jobs are a centuries-old concept created during the Industrial Revolution. Despite the reality that we're now deep in the Information Age, many people are studying for, or working at, or clinging to the Industrial Age idea of a safe, secure job.

L.A. is a vortex. The weather there tricks you into thinking you're on vacation, even when you're working fourteen hours a day.

I'm not one of these million-dollar actors. I have always been just a working actor. I probably work more than I would like to.

My parents were serious working musicians, but they were not stars - not like pop stars that you have now. They had to make a living and that meant touring, working hard, going on the road - and we were roped in.

I recognize the person that wanted to help people, working hard - naively maybe - to make the world a better place. But I don't recognize the person who was drinking the proverbial Kool-Aid.

In some ways, people forget about average working people, and how they live their lives.

Like so many free trade deals before and since, Nafta was sold as a massive opportunity for working people and their prospects. Forecasts spoke of hundreds of thousands of new jobs in all three countries. The reality could not have been more different.

The thing with 'The West Wing' is that the fantasy was legitimately better than the reality - these were smarter, better people than their real-life counterparts, working together at a better White House than the one we had.

It's like, sometimes I'll watch a movie, and it's got some big star in it playing a working-class person, and the character is in a grocery store, and you can kind of tell, from just watching the scene, that this actor doesn't do their own shopping. So you have to have some sense of reality.

I grew up in a show-business family, but we were working-class show business. There was nothing glamorous about it. You had great things one day and the next day, nothing.

The reality is that you think you're going to have all this time out here, to do all this stuff, and the truth of the matter is, you just don't. If we're on the road, and we stay in the city we're in, I'm going to try to get up in the morning and get a workout in.

I would absolutely recommend against excessive positivity and optimism. Any positive emotion that you're infusing into a workplace needs to be grounded in reality. If it's not realistic, sincere, meaningful, and individualized, it won't do much good.

On an average day, we allow ourselves the fiction that we own a piece of our workplace. That's part of what it takes to get the job done. Deeper down, we know it's all on loan.

Put bluntly, the American church today accepts grace in theory but denies it in practice. We say we believe that the fundamental structure of reality is grace, not works - but our lives refute our faith.

With Trixie, people like that I look like this fabricated painted creation, but all my comedy and my songs come from a place of reality. It's like the man behind the curtain - it's the crying clown - that's what works for people with Trixie. It's the dichotomy of someone looking like a toy but then, you know, speaking and singing like a real boy.

You hope to catch the band on a good night and you hope that it sounds good when you hear the tapes back, and you hope that when you mix it you still have the feeling that you had when you were onstage, but it seems like it never quite works out that way!

I wanted to dress the woman who lives and works, not the woman in a painting.

Unfortunately, we are a society that does look down on divorce when, ironically, there are more single divorced people in the world right now. So, the fact of the matter is that it's a reality, and more people should obviously embrace wanting to change, wanting to move on from a relationship that just no longer works for them.

The idea that we are going to be able to take our entire society as it currently works and simply change the source of energy and make it sustainable is not actually congruent with reality.

When you really break it down to the way the world works, we're all little humans floating on a gas ball in the middle of space. That's the reality of our situation. And we've created these concepts and constructs that move us away from that.

I respond well to what I read of Immanuel Kant's idea that the world as we see it is absolutely a function of the way our brain works. In the modern parlance, it's an evolved machine that we carry with us.

In 'Nineteen Eighty-Four,' protagonist Winston Smith works at a propaganda department for the state called the 'Ministry of Truth,' where inconvenient news can be discarded down a 'memory hole.' Orwell was fixated on the idea that under certain governments, the past can be altered or documents rewritten.