Quotes About Reality

Just the life of doing what I do, being in the public eye, it's a stressful environment... You feel strange, self-aware, very foolish. Your third eye clicks on, just to try to maintain a healthy sense of perspective, and you think, 'What am I doing here? I'm just making a movie, and people want all these things from me.'

It doesn't really exist; it's just basically lots of different stages between the two pieces, and you end up with, like, a third shape that doesn't exist but is suggested to you by the image.

If I was on a third or fourth line I would probably be in the NHL, because you don't have to produce every night.

The Third World is not a reality but an ideology.

I think audiences are really thirsty for real shows about real people in any circumstances.

One can see that a canvas is six feet by eight feet, say, quite accurately. But you can spend two minutes and think it's five, or thirty seconds and it's just a different bed for activities there.

For thirty years, I've been hearing that it's getting better for women. And until I see statistical proof over enough years that that's true, I won't believe it.

I do not agree with Thomas Wolfe... about anything. You can go home again as long as you don't expect home to be what it was when you left it. Or you don't expect yourself to be what you were when you left home.

America, to me, is this enormous contrast between the heady idealism of founding fathers such as Thomas Jefferson, who said, 'All men are created equal,' and the reality that he was himself a slave owner.

Belief demands that you dispense with illusion after illusion, while contemporary common sense requires continual, fluffy pretending - pretending that might as well be systematic, it's so thoroughly incentivised by our culture.

If you're pitching to investors for the first time and expecting them to be so blown away by how thoroughly amazing your pitch is that they write a check on the spot - well, prepare to be disappointed.

This is one of those cases in which the imagination is baffled by the facts.

Pray look better, Sir... those things yonder are no giants, but windmills.

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.

Few companies that installed computers to reduce the employment of clerks have realized their expectations... They now need more, and more expensive clerks even though they call them 'operators' or 'programmers.'

How strange when an illusion dies. It's as though you've lost a child.

Even though the society that Marx foresaw is far from being an historical reality, Marxism has penetrated so deeply in history that we are all Marxists, one way or another, even unknowingly.

Romantic comedies seem to take over where the fairytales of childhood left off, feeding our dreams of a soulmate; though, sadly, the Hollywood endings prove quite elusive in the real world.

I still find doing portraits a terrific challenge, but even though I've done hundreds of them, I've never stopped questioning the very nature of portraiture because it deals exclusively with appearances. I've never believed people are what they look like and think it's impossible to really know what people are.

I don't know why I'm suddenly playing nasty people. It is very fun, though, and it isn't real, at the end of the day.

At the cinema, we do not think - we are thought.

Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.

They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.

When I was a kid, I thought I was the strongest man in the world. Then, the fastest runner and then the smartest person in the world. One by one my delusions got shut down. Now I just see myself as the lamest guy in the world.