Quotes About Reality

If you build a life around an identity that springs from your own imagination, is it ever inauthentic?

Both Springsteen and Michael Jackson, who had these huge productions, could always scale them back down to just a song and a melody. All of that influences me. I also try to be a fictional writer, and sometimes I get close, but the things that resonate the most with me - and with everyone else - is what's real.

When I hit New York in 1972, I thought I was a sprinter. I thought that I would star in a Broadway show and do a movie and win an Oscar by the time I was 25. It turned out that I'm a long distance runner.

In my head, I think I'd make a perfect spy, but in reality, I don't think I'd fare very well.

For a book to function... it has to be a functioning reality. The character has to be real, and I imagine that's exactly what happens for a spy who is in deep cover.

Though the National Bureau of Economic Research deemed the recession to have ended in June 2009, to most Americans, that conclusion seems not to square with reality.

I grew up on Harvard Square and I watched 50-year old men walking around with green book bags slung over their shoulders going for their fourth PhD, never having left the world of academia to alleged reality.

Dating shows should exist for people who aren't straight. They're out there, there aren't enough of them. Whether you try and squeeze a format that already works into something else. I don't know.'

In my mind, I'm still this kid from St. Louis, Missouri, that nobody really knows.

Modern capitalism seeks to assure us that it operates according to the principles of free creativity, endless development and diversity. It glosses over its other side in order to hide the reality that millions of people are enslaved by an all-powerful and fantastically stable norm of production. We want to reveal this lie.

We are at crisis point. I think anybody that sees this nation as being on stable economic or fiscal ground is fooling themselves.

There are the people who read my horror novels - the first two of them - and they found them scary or whatever, and then there are some people who are maybe not entirely stable who think that they're real, who think that they're being stalked by the same demons or ghosts that are mentioned in the books.

It's our vanity that makes us think that what forms part of our world today must be stable and secure.

The world in the '90s had seemed somewhat stable. There was talk of the end of history, a calm consensus around where we were all going. Consumer capitalism with some sort of social conscience. Then 9/11 happened, and that illusion was blown out of the water.

When you're pregnant, you go out and buy every single book; you have this stack of books on your nightstand, but there was nothing that was preparing me for anything even remotely resembling what my life was going to look like.

If you've stacked on the weight over time, and if you don't have any health issues, you don't realise. So you'll see yourself in the mirror and, yes, you know what the scales say, but you don't actually see what other people see.

I enjoy sports movies that don't sugarcoat. One thing that irritates me about sports movies is that they're like, 'The magic of the ball,' and 'The magic of the stadium.' It ain't that magical. When you get hit coming across the middle at 25 miles per hour, the magic's over.

You don't want to get too ahead of yourself and go out thinking you can play stadiums every night, and they end up being about half-full.

I don't want to act as though my deployment was particularly rough, because it wasn't. I had a very mild deployment; I was a staff officer.

The New Labour doctrine that skills training was the responsibility of employers was flawed. The idea that employers should take on a bigger role ignores the reality that employers have no incentive to train staff to leave. We can hardly expect Tesco to train checkout staff to become dental nurses.

I find it difficult to portray something I've never experienced before. For the character I played in 'Miss Lee,' I had to ask friends and staff members what it was like to be a low-level employee as I've never been one myself.

My whole process is based on meditation as well as listening really closely to what the director says and what the choreographer says. I try to stay in the immediate present reality with my partners on stage, give and take reality.

Nothing is real until you walk out on stage.

Nothing that you see on 'Indian Idol' is ever staged or planned.