Reality

"Above all we have to go beyond words and images and concepts. No imaginative vision or conceptual framework is adequate to the great reality."

"It is great good health to believe as the Hindus do that there are 33 million gods and goddesses in the world. It is great good health to want to understand one s dreams. It is great good health to desire the ambiguous and paradoxical. It is sickness of the profoundest kind to believe that there is one reality. There is sickness in any piece of work or any piece of art seriously attempting to suggest that the idea that there is more than one reality is somehow redundant."

"What Is A Belief?"

"The distance between your Dreams and Reality is inversely proportional to your Efforts."

"In every possibility of a mind May you travel, yet not blind. As a head filled with imagination, Goes a heart full of gold creation, It's never late to have a dream. Nor is it so far away as it seems, And, like a rearview mirror reveals, Thus a fantasy soon becomes real. It may be closer than it appears. Or at least it will show up clear. Never give up a dream for fear!"

"You took life by the horns and tried to hold on tight, for fear of being ripped to shreds, left bloodied and battered."

"What is it you do, then? I'll tell you: You leave out whatever doesn't suit you. As the author himself has done before you. Just as you leave things out of your dreams and fantasies. By leaving things out, we bring beauty and excitement into the world. We evidently handle our reality by effecting some sort of compromise with it, an in-between state where the emotions prevent each other from reaching their fullest intensity, graying the colors somewhat. Children who haven't yet reached that point of control are both happier and unhappier than adults who have. And yes, stupid people also leave things out, which is why ignorance is bliss. So I propose, to begin with, that we try to love each other as if we were characters in a novel who have met in the pages of a book. Let's in any case leave off all the fatty tissue that plumps up reality."

"The average Bhutanese knows much more about the world than the average American...(for Americans)It is more comfortable to watch fake news about celebrities than to know what's happening in China or southern Sudan. But events happening in China or Sudan affect us so much more because they are real."

"Just as it is known That an image of one's face is seen Depending on a mirror But does not really exist as a face,So the conception of "I" exists Dependent on mind and body,But like the image of a face The "I" does not at all exist as its own reality."

"The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance."

"The real Julian Wells didn't die in a cherry-red convertible, overdosing on a highway in Joshua Tree while a choir soared over the sound track."

"What about reality, you ask? Well, as far as I'm concerned, reality can go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. I've never held much of a brief for reality, at least in my written work. All too often it is to the imagination what ash stakes are to vampires."

"[R]eality and real people are too subtle and complicated for anybody's typewriter, even Tolstoy's, even yours, even mine."

"Sometimes I scare myself at how easily I slip inside my mind and live vicariously through these characters."

"Remember William Blake who said: "Improvement makes straight, straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius."The truth is, life itself, is always startling, strange, unexpected. But when the truth is told about it everybody knows at once that it is life itself and not made up. But in ordinary fiction, movies, etc, everything is smoothed out to seem plausible--villains made bad, heroes splendid, heroines glamorous, and so on, so that no one believes a word"

"When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that's not familiar. But I'm not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear."

"He thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it."

"There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong."

"Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system."

"I must not imagine what is ‘not’ as a means of escaping what ‘is’. Rather, I must understand what ‘is’ and imagine how I can make it what it is ‘not’."