Quotes About Illusion

Just as the 99% of Soviet citizens who supported the Soviet regime in 1985 was no indication of what the people inside the USSR really thought, the army of true believers that we think we see in the Arab world is an illusion.

No Christians I know who are supporting Trump are under the illusion that The Donald is a seasoned student of Scripture.

The cosmetics world and mentalism are both arenas of deception, but I suppose the difference is that mentalists and magicians are more honest about it. People tell me I have good skin, and I tell them the magic secret is E45 cream: cheap, cheerful, and very effective.

The conceit of an anchorman is we never think we're going to die, I suppose.

Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin.

I don't think Hollywood per se is supposed to be taken seriously, otherwise, dear Lord, that would be frightening.

Maybe entertainment is not supposed to be reality.

I think objectivity is like this strange myth that people think you're supposed to achieve, but actually, the dirty little secret is that it's not attainable any more than pure justice is attainable by the courts.

In 'Summer and Smoke,' I was supposed to be a plain-Jane wallflower, and instead, I had all these costumes. I looked like a Barbie doll.

What happen to the pirates we are supposed to see? Then we go down the chutes, and it's where the pirates were. But they're all gone. There is nothing but skeletons down here!

Hood films now are made by studios and have nothing to do with the reality they supposedly represent.

Are you really sure that a floor can't also be a ceiling?

I always really liked magicians. I'm not even sure why - except that they know things other people don't, and they live in untidy rooms full of strange objects.

If you grow up in show business, you look beyond the looking glass. So, all of the surface facades get broken.

The painting is not on a surface, but on a plane which is imagined. It moves in a mind. It is not there physically at all. It is an illusion, a piece of magic, so that what you see is not what you see.

Vanity is but the surface.

In L.A., it's not on the surface. Everything is in the cracks. The restaurant out front will look like this old, boring place, and you'll go inside, and it's this lush, beautifully designed restaurant.

Verisimilitude is something I am constantly seeking in fiction. I am looking for surface detail that makes something seem real.

L.A. is a very strange place. On the surface, it has an innocent appearance, like the stranger with the pleasant face that smiles and shakes your hand. But then you learn it is actually a lot less nice than you think, and there's a whole deeper, darker level.

Sometimes I feel like I must be hinting at this deep well of knowledge when, really, I just skim off the surface.

I grew up in suburbia, so it's a world I'm familiar with... but in my experience, all the families that I grew up thinking were the perfect families who kept it together... all their secrets would come out, and it'd be something dark and disgusting beneath the surface, so I wanted to exploit that.

About myself I have no great illusions. I know what I am. I know what I'm good at. I know what I ain't. I'm always hoping to surprise myself. But I do have a love of music and I do love to communicate it, and that's the best I can do, really. And I can raise a good family, too.

I saw what I thought was a donkey posing on the stairs but much to my surprise it was Kim Kardashian.

I'm always surprised to rediscover that there's something kind of scary about life; and that the feeling we have that we're in charge is probably ill founded.