“Whatever is a reality today, whatever you touch and believe in and that seems real for you today, is going to be -- like the reality of yesterday -- an illusion tomorrow.”
“What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.”
“To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. To hell with them!”
“Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems --but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems incredible.”
“The genuine artist is never ''true to life.'' He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.”
“Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will. All the rest --thought, action --is just a pastime, mental or physical. What counts then, is to come to grips with reality. The rest can go.”
“The very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyper real.”
“The reality of life is that your perceptions -- right or wrong -- influence everything else you do. When you get a proper perspective of your perceptions, you may be surprised how many other things fall into place.”
“All the things you think you should have done that you didn't do, and all of the things that you shouldn't have done, accept them. You did (or did not) do them. That's reality. That's happened. No changing the past.”
“What is meant by ''reality''? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable -- now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying”
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
“Realism should only be the means of expression of religious genius... or, at the other extreme, the artistic expressions of monkeys which are quite satisfied with mere imitation. In fact, art is never realistic though sometimes it is tempted to be. To be really realistic a description would have to be endless.”
“Realism, whether it be socialist or not, falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.”
“Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe. What we believe is based upon our perceptions. What we perceive depends upon what we look for. What we look for depends upon what we think. What we think depends upon what we perceive. What we perceive determines what we believe. What we believe determines what we take to be true. what we take to be true is our reality.”