Quotes About Reality

I am only 8 years old, I told myself. No little boy of 8 has ever murdered anyone. It's not possible.

A few years ago, the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved bowls... saying that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl with curved sides because, gazing out, the fish would have a distorted view of reality. But how do we know we have the true, undistorted picture of reality?

Our task as fiction writers isn't just to report something that didn't really happen. We have to give what we write a sense of reality. The tool of our tradition is language.

'The Godfather' illustrated the family values - the reality that it was really a family thing, honor and tradition. It wasn't just a single-dimension thing.

Since the birth of modern Orthodox Judaism in 19th-century Germany, a central goal of the movement has been to normalize the observance of traditional Jewish law - to make it possible to follow all 613 biblical commandments assiduously while still participating in the reality of the modern world.

In 'The Sopranos,' these guys know their best years are behind them. They have nostalgia for their old traditions. In their minds, they're looking for a time when loyalty mattered, community mattered. E Street is about community, too. People are looking for something real.

Well, I think I'm trying to be in the middle of two traditions, the French tradition, which is about being fair and staying close to reality, and the American tradition which is about making up a stylized universe, made of shapes and colors.

You might think of Hollywood as this full-on glamorous thing and to us it was like, 'All right, mom's got an audition. Do you want to sit in traffic for 50 minutes and go in with her?'

After 'Chandni Bar' there was a shutdown of such bars in Mumbai. After 'Page 3' people started avoiding such events. 'Traffic Signal' exposed the money flow through the mafia. I'm not apologetic about the brutal truth in my films. Almost 70% of my films are based on reality, and 30% I fictionalize or change to suit my film.

Every Olympics, they make a big deal out of something - security... traffic... pollution... something - and it really doesn't come true. For me, there's never been a problem.

When we look at human trafficking, we always think that it's far away from us.

When people look at me outside, they think, 'She's so lucky,' but no one's exempt from tragedy.

I feel like humor and tragedy are all on the same coin, and it's all a part of the same process as humans as we assimilate reality.

Somewhere along the line, positive thinking seems to have been confused with magical thinking. There's a notion that if you think positively enough, you can make anything happen by using the power of your mind. All the positive thinking in the world won't deliver good fortune or prevent tragedy from striking.

When you close your eyes to tragedy, you close your eyes to greatness.

Well I would say that we're regular people first of all and we're normal and it's obvious by some of the things that have happened just because our name is famous we're not immune to tragedy.

Tragedy is one of the larger prices we pay for being alive. No one ever sidesteps tragedy. It is always there, shadowing us.

It does no good to believe in what does not exist to the point one cannot focus on what is real. That would be the greatest tragedy of any 'conspiracy.'

I am very interested in that fine line between fiction and reality and between comedy and tragedy - and pushing the line as much as possible.

A comic book and a straight drama all have the same elements. If you're playing tragedy, you have to be aware of the comedy; if you're playing comedy, you have to be aware of the tragedy. If you're playing comic book, you have to be aware of the reality.

If we didn't desensitize ourselves in some way, every day would feel like its own tragedy.

Much of the best humor is found in the frequently tragic reality of human experience.

Comedy comes from tragedy, and being Iranian in America from 1979 on had been quite tragic. In stand-up comedy, I was able to take the reality and exaggerate it.

Life is not a piece of tragic fiction in which, at the end of the reading, we all get up and go out for drinks.