Rick Yancey Quotes

It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are... than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.

The moment you start being in love with what you're doing, and thinking it's beautiful or rich, then you're in danger.

You love what you do, you are cursed with it, and then you get known for being cursed with it.

The biggest misconception about my game is my love for it. This is what I want to do. I owe this thing my life. There's no other way around it.

By meditation we try to slow down the mechanism of projections. If the mechanism is slowed down and even for a single moment you begin to be aware of the gap - imageless gap of the screen - you have the glimpse. Suddenly you know that you have lived in the dreams of your own creation; and whatsoever you have known as the world was not the world really, it was YOUR world.

Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.

Martha: Truth or illusion, George; you don't know the difference. George: No, but we must carry on as though we did. Martha: Amen.

You look at me and see the girl,who lives inside the golden world,but don't believe, that's all there is to see,you'll never know the real me.

Ask José Mourinho, he wouldn't know a thing about me, my sport - he knows football, and to get to high levels you have to be insane, nothing else means anything.

It is very often nothing but our own vanity that deceives us. Women fancy admiration means more than it does. And men take care that they should.

But an Adrian also knew that an Adrian's lies were real: they were lived and felt and acted out as thoroughly as another man's truths - if other men had truths - and he believed it possible that this last lie might see him through to the grave.

Being a geek just means that you're passionate about something.

This is everything to me. If I don't have this, I don't know what else I'll be doing. I personally have found where I belong. You can cut back to photos of me holding, uh, paper championships. That was truly my dream. This is what I was born to do. As far as walking away from all this to do something else, I don't..I just don't...I don't see the rationality.

Catch-22 did not exist, he was positive of that, but it made no difference. What did matter was that everyone thought it existed, and that was much worse, for there was no object or text to ridicule or refute, to accuse, criticize, attack, amend, hate, revile, spit at, rip to shreds, trample upon or burn up.

Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.

I'm interested in such things as the difference between how we perceive the world and what the world turns out to be. The difference is between the stories we tell others and the stories we tell ourselves. There is a wonderful Russian saying, which I use as the epigraph of one of my novels, which goes, He lies like an eyewitness. Which is very sly, clever and true.

And I find myself saying, “It wasn’t really about her.” And finding it’s true. What do you mean?” Norah asks. It was about the feeling, you know? She caused it in me, but it wasn’t about her. It was about my reaction, what I wanted to feel and then convinced myself that I felt, because I wanted it that bad. That illusion. It was love because I created it as love.

Once I get on something, once I have something that I'm working on, then I become very obsessive. In a good way. I mean,... is there a positive way to say obsessive? It's a good thing and if you're out there and you're working on something right now and you're crazed and you're up in the middle of the night, or you can't stop thinking about it, or you have to keep reading other things about the subject that you're working on or whatever. That's good and I think that's necessary creatively.

To do anything to a high level it has to be total obsession. Ask José Mourinho, he wouldn't know a thing about me, my sport - he knows football, and to get to high levels you have to be insane, nothing else means anything. I respect all forms of movement and lifestyles, but I am in a bubble. I wake up, it is in my head; I go to sleep, it's in my head, 24/7.

A man’s greatest treasures are his illusions - Durzo Blint

The most important work I got a chance to be involved in, no matter what I do, is the personal computer... I even knew not to get married until later because I was so obsessed with it. That's my life's work.

That's the point. Every kind of animal thinks its own kind of animal is wonderful. So people getting married think they're wonderful, and that they're going to have a baby-- that's wonderful, when actually they're as ugly as rhinoceroses. Just because we think we're so wonderful doesn't mean we really are. We could be really terrible animals and just never admit it because it would hurt so much.

Facts mean nothing when they are preempted by appearance. Do not underestimate the power of impression over reality.

Belief is a meaningless word. What does it mean? I believe something. Okay, now you have someone who is hearing voices and believes in these voices. It doesn't mean they have any necessary reality. Your whole concept of your "I" is an illusion. You have to give something called an "I" before you speak of what the "I" believes.

Your mission isn't a project to check off your list. It's a commitment to which to dedicate your life.