Andrew Klavan Quotes

In short, not only are things not what they seem, they are not even what they are called!

Society? Can we trust us? Doubt it. We're probably not even real, as was revealed in the popular documentary The Matrix. That bloke next door? Made of pixels. Your co-workers? Pixels. You? One pixel. One measly pixel. You haven't even got shoes, for Christ's sake.

No, none of us seem so very real. We're only supporting characters in the lives of each other. Any real truth, any precious fact will always be lost in a mountain of shattered make-believe.

What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?

Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It's everyone's, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet.

The American citizen lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than its original. We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly irridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories to the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves.

But that's not the name of a man, it's the name of a mountain! (...) "It is my name," Athos said calmly. "But you said your name was d'Artagnan." "I?" "Yes, you." "That is to say, someone said to me: 'You are M. d'Artagnan?' I replied: 'You think so?' My guards shouted that they were sure of it. I did not want to vex them. Besides, I might have been mistaken.

Illusion never changed into something real.

Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible.

It was a dance of masks and every mask was perfect because every mask was a real face and every face was a real mask so there was no mask and there was no face for there was but one dance in which there was but one mask but one true face which was the same and which was a thing without a name which changed and changed into itself over and over.

All you know is what you think you know, but that isn't always what's real.

Only a Californian would have observed that it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the real fake from the fake fake.

The concept, the label, is perpetually hiding from us all the nature of the real.

I'm a novelist, and idle speculation is what novelists do. How odd to spend one's life trying to pretend that non-existent people are real: though no odder, I suppose, than what government bureaucrats do, which is trying to pretend that real people are non-existent.

Real’ is a dirty word in this place.

No one wants to be part of a fiction, and even less so if that fiction is real.

Nothing is real.

We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.

All is but illusion and disaster.

By deceiving one another through false assumptions and misrepresentations there has been, in reality, a great lapse and delay in achieving the real goals.

What you see with your eyes is not necessarily real.

If ignorance were enough to make things not exist, the world would be more like a lot of people think it is. But it's not. And it's not.

The world isn't what you think it is.

Every real object must cease to be what it seemed, and none could ever be what the whole soul desired.

Fantasy and reality often overlap.