James Howard Kunstler Quotes

How easy it is for a fantasy to grab hold of your foot like a rope, and dangle your life upside down while brigands go through your pockets. Deal with the life you've got. Solve the problems you have, rather than fantasizing about a life without them.

Dreams have only the pigmentation of fact.

You have to look life straight in the eye. De-mystify your world. Can you really afford to believe magic is for real? Not when time is concerned.

Fantasy is seductive and much more wonderful than reality, but you can't take it to the bank. It's always an escape. And if used as an escape, as in attending a movie or a show for a circumscribed period of time, it's fine. When it starts to become undifferentiated from reality, it leads to big trouble.

Why is it people who want the truth never believe it when they hear it?

We ought not to desire the impossible.

One can't believe impossible things.

Leaders must see reality as it is, not as it ought to be.

I think that the idea of boundaries is being challenged everywhere. And I think our fascination with sci-fi is that it is a boundary-less world where we can kind of create the reality that we believe to be as opposed to the reality that is. It is about the beyond and the unknown in a different way than pretty much any type of storytelling is.

Theory and practice sometimes clash. And when that happens, theory loses. Every single time.

What Is, is more important than What Should Be.

The days of idealism had gone. Only life was left.

Now, for Romney to believe that somebody's grandmother is going to be so cut off she is going to self deport... He certainly shows no concern for the humanity of people who are already here... I think you have to live in worlds of Swiss bank accounts and Cayman Island accounts and automatic $20 million a year income with no work to have some fantasy this far from reality.

A piece of advice I would give to young actors - hang on to your family, and hang on to your reality - and hang on to your "real". Because you're going into the land of make believe.

The only way to keep a dream, any dream at all, to keep a dream perfect and rosy and intact and unsullied is never to live it out. The moment you carry out any of your dreams or your fantasies - travel around the world, climbing a high mountain, buying a new house, writing a novel, carrying out a sexual fantasy, traveling to an unknown country - the moment you carry out your dreams, it's always, by definition less perfect and rosy than it had been as a dream. This is the nature of dreams.

If you make things too real, sometimes you bring it down to the mundane.

Repeat, over and over again, in case anyone forgets it or believes the contrary, that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds.

I have no time for lies and fantasy, and neither should you. Enjoy or die.

But once you get down to reality, there's no one to play her and there's no movie. It would be ridiculous.

I believe there is no part of our lives, our adult as well as child life, when we're not fantasizing, but we prefer to relegate fantasy to children, as though it were some tomfoolery only fit for the immature minds of the young. Children do live in fantasy and reality; they move back and forth very easily in a way we no longer remember how to do.

I think that people who can't believe in faeries aren't worth knowing. I just think that alternate realities make you a good writer. If your work is any more than one dimension, you believe in faeries.

I don’t believe one reads to escape reality. A person reads to confirm a reality he knows is there, but which he has not experienced.

Just because it's a dream doesn't mean it's a lie.

Photography threatens fantasy.

I cannot invest the way I want the world to be; I have to invest the way the world is.