Quotes About Illusion

Marx was fortunate to have been born eighty years before Walt Disney. Disney also promised a child's paradise and unlike Marx, delivered on his promise.

'Perfect' is about a set-up that looks perfect from the outside - beautiful country house, beautiful wife and mother, everything where it should be - and the deep fissures that, in fact, lie beneath that. 'Perfect' was partly a response to the shock of my first book, 'The Unlikely Pilgrimage Of Harold Fry,' being a success.

Fame is an unnatural construct and those who go in search of it are the least likely to find it.

The theater itself is a lie. Its deaths are mere special effects. Its tales never happened. Even the histories are distorted for dramatic effect. The theater is unnatural, a place of imagination. But the theater tells the audience something true: that the world requires judgments.

A lot of things in films are cheated with the use of camera tricks, so while it may feel unnatural to do, when you look at the result, you realise that it is right.

Watching foreign affairs is sometimes like watching a magician; the eye is drawn to the hand performing the dramatic flourishes, leaving the other hand - the one doing the important job - unnoticed.

Usually, when people watch magic, there are two levels: the people who walk away accepting that there are things they don't know, and the other group, who wants to know, 'How did it work? How did that happen?' They want to unravel the puzzle.

One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we'll need a new definition.

There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.

The circus allows one to be logical and unreal at the same time. In the circus, all is possible: there can be a man with two heads or a character with a green face.

You have to be a little unreal to be in this business.

All phenomena are real in some sense, unreal in some sense, meaningless in some sense, real and meaningless in some sense, unreal and meaningless in some sense, and real and unreal and meaningless in some sense.

Sometimes what is 'real' because it takes place in the physical world, like 9/11, is so unreal on the level of the soul. Then other things, which in terms of the physical world seem so magical and unbelievable, on the level of the soul seem very real.

Yet, the Universe is real enough to the conscious beings in it, which are as unreal as it is itself.

I hardly need to abstract things, for each object is unreal enough already, so unreal that I can only make it real by means of painting.

It seems like the older I get, the more unreal the world becomes.

You know a movie is good when things that are unreal have gotten into your head, and now your day is not the same.

In America, you watch TV and think that's totally unreal, then you step outside and it's just the same.

For all the spectacle of CGI, there's something alien and unreal about that domain, like a videogame.

It's expected of novels that they should explain the world and create the illusion that things are ultimately logical and coherent. But that's not what I see around me. Often, events remain mysterious and unresolved, and our emotions reach no catharsis.

Appearances are a glimpse of the unseen.

It's been unsettling to discover that every form of narrative, even one that purports to tell the truth, is a kind of lying.

It is the unspoken ethic of all magicians to not reveal the secrets.

Everything seems really simple on paper until you take a camera out of the box.