Quotes About Reality

When you say you grew up in Los Angeles, a lot of people think the west side: they think the glitz and all this stuff that I actually had no relationship to growing up.

You can't take a coal miner making $95,000 a year, the only work in these parts where you can support a family without having to hold down three jobs at once... and tell them, 'You can make minimum wage,' or, 'We can give you job training for jobs that don't exist in West Virginia.'

Fiction is lies; we're writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. But it has to have a truth at the core of it.

Oriental reality is called ideology in Europe and America, and Western ideology is called reality in the Orient. Those viewpoints eat into people's souls and form two distinct kinds of beings.

The only reality is our society, and I mean this seriously, Western Society is a very sick society.

I mean, Iceland is Iceland. It can't do damage to anybody unless you're Icelandic. But the United States can drag down the entire western economy. And I think what we are seeing is simply a reflection of reality. This is not, I'm sorry, but this is not a AAA nation.

The Western media tends to place a lot of emphasis on official institutions in Ukraine such as its supreme court, the central election commission, and the parliament. In reality, the people of Ukraine now control their destiny.

You just have to open the newspapers in most Western news to see real violence.

It's only Western civilization that, God forbid, you talk about dying, when it's the only thing we know for certain, right? Everyone's going to die, so what's the big problem? 'Oh, God. Don't talk about it. Don't think about it.' I mean, I'm one of them. I'm not a big fan of talking about dying.

Powerful people are always in charge. You have to acknowledge that and deal with it as a reality. They're not devils. They're not monsters. They're human beings, like us, that have their share of insecurities and fears. You have to contemplate that as you go through life.

But I'm 185 pounds and 5'8'. I can't be a powerhouse, I can't be powerbombing people everywhere. That doesn't make sense.

The things shamans deal with are extremely practical. They break down parameters of normal historical reality. Magical passes are just one aspect of that.

I went to school to study literature and writing, even though I didn't end up really doing that in the end. I thought I would be a teacher, but I didn't really think about it in any practical way.

We need a romantic illusion to embark on relationships in the first place. After that, they survive or fail for other, more practical reasons.

Earlier, even I used to think that I would be doing theatre all my life, but as I grew, I understood that it was not practically possible.

The world is equally shocked at hearing Christianity criticized and seeing it practiced.

I'm really pragmatic. That's my reality.

Pragmatism is not always a good thing. Experience is not always a good thing.

The highest praise is when a kid says, 'This book feels so real; this could have happened at my school.'

Well 'Impractical Jokers' isn't really a prank show, because the joke is on us. We make ourselves look like idiots in front of the public. So the public is mostly confused about what is happening.

The thing for me is to always tell the truth. Not to preach, but to tell the truth.

A good autobiography is like a document: a mirror of the age on which people can 'depend.' In a novel, by contrast, it's not the facts that matter, but precisely what you add to the facts.

Once you recognize that all documentaries are performance, it's not a matter of 'if' they should be performance. They are performance, and they are performance precisely where people are playing themselves.

People come to the theatre in search of a real encounter with other human beings, and we must give them what they come for. Our capacity to do that is the measure of being human. And if the price is that we sometimes say something not very pleasant - well, that's precisely why people want us, in the end: because we speak the truth.