Quotes About Reality

In Austin, someone has scrawled on the bathroom wall of a cafe on Congress Street, 'I don't know if you or I exist, but somewhere there are poems about us.

Theory and practice sometimes clash. And when that happens, theory loses. Every single time.

A man of imagination has an advantage over other people, in that an actual experience is almost always less intense than his expectations of it.

An actual misfortune is almost always less painful to him than his fear of it, just as, of course, his actual experience of joys is almost always less stirring than his hopes and anticipations of them.

We soon lost all sense of privacy in the camp. There was no effort to conceal ugliness and deformity, whether of body or of soul. One saw much that was ugly beyond words.

It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.

why worry about the monster beneath the bed when a very real bogeyman sleeps on top of it?

Because you and I are alike that way. We know monsters are real, and they don't all live under the bed.

They have to get through each day, which makes truth a fickle companion.

It's a popular trick among the streetwise to appear richer than they are.

It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of individual's and society's self-deception.

On the other hand, in a society whose communication component is becoming more prominent day by day, both as a reality and as an issue, it is clear that language assumes a new importance.

When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them, they show us the state of our decay.

The most sensible people to be met with in society are men of business and of the world, who argue from what they see and know, instead of spinning cobweb distinctions of what things ought to be.

I try to photograph my own and society's hypocrisy.

Everyone in my book accuses everyone else of being crazy. Frankly, I think the whole society is nuts - and the question is: What does a sane man do in an insane society?

A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.

American society has gone completely into denial.

Misconceptions play a prominent role in my view of the world.

It's not me but the world that's deranged.

What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world.

In a multicultural, diverse society there are countless ways in which people negotiate the everyday lived experience and reality of diversity.

Anybody who feels at ease in the world today is a fool.

If we could all take a sober look at our history, then we would no longer see this nostalgic attitude to the Soviet past that predominates among the less affected part of our society.