Quotes About Illusion

I liked the America of Bing Crosby, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton - it was all a dream, of course, but a very alluring dream for a young man from Canton.

It is easy to fall into the trap of believing that democracy will improve the function of policy.

I feel an image is a creeping jail growing all around you without you even realising it. Suddenly, you are trapped, and an actor should never be trapped.

The trappings of lifestyle are often that; traps.

Fashion pictures show people looking glamorous. Travel pictures show a place looking at its best, nothing to do with the reality. In the cookery pages, the food always looks amazing, right? Most of the pictures we consume are propaganda.

You are traveling and see these people shooting the entire experience of going through a city, and maybe in the back of their minds they sustain the illusion that they will edit it all, but I don't think that's it.

I heard that I was off traveling around the world skiing in Argentina and things like that. I may have had a great life in somebody's mind, but all I was seeing was 9th Avenue while going from my house down to the studio in New York City.

One travels to escape from it all, but that is the great illusion: It cannot be done, since one travels with one's mind.

I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it.

Hollywood, it has treated me so nicely, I am ready to faint! As soon as I see Hollywood, I love it.

Farce treats the improbable as probable, the impossible as possible.

On embarking to return we could perceive no sign of One Tree Island; and as we swept down towards the sea the leafy top of a tree seen in the clear water under the boat was the only evidence of its existence; though a few hours ago it had formed so prominent an object.

If someone were to think that trees are made to support the sky, they would all seem too short.

It's nice to have dreams, but when you use borrowed money to achieve them and act as if money grows on trees, you may have a brutal awakening.

Right now, there's the illusion of order and civilization, but there's a tremendous amount of economic tension in this country and the educational system is constantly eroding.

Modern American magic, late 20th century magic, is tremendously disrespectful of the audience.

It doesn't take many observations to think you've spotted a trend, and it's probably not a trend at all.

I like graceful and elegant partnering that gives an illusion of ease instead of emphasizing difficulty. I don't want to make something 'contemporary' or 'trendy,' because ballet doesn't progress on one track: it can branch out in many directions, and as Balanchine showed, there's always room for pure classicism and more subtle alterations of it.

The fact that Manti Te'o thought for a long time that he was dating, like, a fake girl and then that she died and did the tribute and the girl never existed. I mean inherently that's funny.

Every time you perform a magic trick, you're engaging in experimental psychology. If the audience asks, 'How the hell did he do that?' then the experiment was successful.

Movies started out as an extension of a magic trick, so making a spectacle is part of the game.

I'm a firm believer that character is highly overrated. Character is a trick that we do with the audience's collusion.

Don't buy into a superficial reality. It has an expiration date.

Truth may be stranger than fiction, but fiction is truer.