Quotes About Illusion

Mystical additions and subtractions always come out the way you want.

I'll no longer say that I have supernatural powers. I am an entertainer. I want to do a good show. My entire character has changed.

The myth works to make the very real things people don't want to look at visible for them.

My illusion is to have something to transmit. If I can't change the world, at least I want to change the way people look at it.

Things aren't always as they appear. I've been believing things to be a certain way because I want them to be that way. I build up illusions in my head.

These days there are a lot of people who just want to be famous. I think that comes from a naive place, because those people generally don't know what it's like.

No matter the truth, people see what they want to see.

People always want the stars of movies to fall in love with one another.

The blind see what they want to see.

Don't mistake the Russia you want to exist for the Russia that there actually is. Be realistic.

Actors are insanely competitive and they hold back on each other. They are like magicians and none of them want to show their tricks.

In magic, it takes two or three years for me to create a 5-minute illusion for me to get it to the level I want.

Be careful what you're doing, because no one is ever who you want them to be.

Actors always want you to believe something else even though that's the truth and to do that well it's almost a dying art.

We believe whatever we want to believe.

Yes, there's a certain power to a photograph. The camera has a way of disorienting a person, if it wants to and, for me, when it disorients, it's got real value.

Venice is beautiful, but like a Bergman movie is beautiful; you can admire it, but you don't really want to live in it.

And so, yet again, we crush the blossom in our hand, lift our gaze from the tumbling petals, and ask the world, 'Where, then, is this beauty you promised?

Time promised everything and delivered nothing.

The simple ones aren't simple. The broken ones aren't broken. They are rearranged.

Even the beasts succumb to such aggression. Killers among your kind, among my kind, are just that – the savagery of beasts mated with intelligence, or what passes for intelligence. They dwell in a murky world, sir, confused and fearful, stained dark with envy and malice. And in the end, they die as they lived. Frightened and alone, with every memory of power revealed as illusion, as farce.

The historian, now witness, stumbling in the illusion that he will survive. Long enough to set the details down on parchment in the frail belief that truth is a worthwhile cause. That the tale will become a lesson heeded. Frail belief? Outright lie, a delusion of the worst sort. The lesson of history is that no one learns.

The world was full of lies. And people keep telling us we need them, all in the name of peace. But the peace we got was poison.

I've been telling myself this was being alive. This here. This…hiding. Wishing. Dreaming. Wanting. And all the while, what does anyone else see when they look at me?