Quotes About Illusion

Stardom can be a gilded slavery.

I see stardom very clearly as a construct that's been created in order to sell things.

I didn't fall for a lot of that stardom stuff.

I don't believe in the concept of stardom.

People have such false perceptions of how stardom really works.

I feel when a new comer acts in his first film, he starts feeling top of world and nature changes due to the stardom. And then downfall starts to happen.

I have lived too long to cherish many illusions about the essential high-mindedness of men when brought into stark confrontation with the issue of control over their security, and their property interests.

When I first joined 'Dancing with the Stars,' I did not want to do it. It's not what I like, it's not what I believe in... the judges are fake, this is fake, that is fake... there is not a lot of reality.

The first time I arrived in Hollywood for the Grammy Awards, I thought I'd bump into people who mattered, such as Ry Cooder or Randy Newman. I was disappointed to see the people I'd always thought of as pop stars. They would charge around the stage rather than enjoy the music.

David Cronenberg's 'Maps to the Stars' is a Hollywood monster movie in which Hollywood is the monster.

Celebrities, movie stars and rock stars are losing their mystique.

I'm a bit of a P. T. Barnum. I make stars out of everyone.

Well, we all start thinking we're going to be Romantic rock stars, but then reality hits and you realize no one reads you but other poets.

Maybe we should have known that night in Denver that things that begin with plywood Greek columns and artificial smoke typically don't end well. Maybe the Hollywood stars and the glamour blinded us a little: you thought it was the glare, some of us thought it was a halo.

People have to start realizing that money is just a fiction, an idea.

Since we were kids, we grow up believing that astronauts are heroes - that to go up in a rocket is a heroic thing. These guys are bigger than movie stars. To me, it's... all a well-dressed-up lie, basically. There's billions spent on rockets up there, and there's millions starving down here. It don't make sense to me.

In North Korea I literally believed that my Dear Leader was starving. He's the fattest guy - how can anyone believe that?

I think the greatest illusion we have is that denial protects us. It's actually the biggest distortion and lie. In fact, staying asleep is what's killing us.

We have that illusion that we are 'deciding' what to make a character do, in order to 'convey our message' or something like that. But, at least in my experience, you are often more like a river-rafting guide who's been paid a bonus to purposely steer your clients into the roughest possible water.

L.A. is... I always feel sort of abducted when I'm there, like I've stepped onto another planet where everyone looks the same.

Being in the camera's eye is like stepping into a dream world, one that is often more interesting than real life.

I honestly thought that Mission Hills, with its castellated palazzi, was normal and that other places were the aberration. I played with the tots of millionaires and convinced myself that America was a classless society, where all that mattered was ability and one's willingness to work.

Fame sometimes hath created something of nothing.

Yes, Germany is dark, and Berlin is darker. But it is not so clear in Berlin what part of the dark is now faux dark and what part of the dark is real.