Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes

Things seemed to go back and forth between reality and imagination--except that it was all reality.

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.

Maybe entertainment is not supposed to be reality.

I wonder if it's in the nature of fiction writers to never quite see their own lives as 'real,' since we are always making stuff up!

We live in a culture that has a real hard time distinguishing fiction from reality. Even when they're told something is fiction.

Few people have the imagination for reality.

... imagination robs us in great measure of reality...

How different would our perception of reality be if... we discarded the mundane events that cannot coexist with our dreams?

Life is an unbroken succession of false situations.

They said, 'You have a blue guitar, / You do not play things as they are.' / The man replied, 'Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.'

No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world.

There is the strange power we have of changing facts by the force of the imagination.

Poetry is a shuffling of boxes of illusions buckled with a strap of facts.

I suppose I could understand it if men had simply forgotten unicorns, but not to see them at all, to look at them and see something else — what do they look to one another, then? What do trees look like to them, or houses, or real horses, or their own children?

All the mind's activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality.

Our first ideas of life are generally taken from fiction rather than fact.

Without art we would be nothing but foreground and live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and most vulgar appear as if it were vast, and reality itself.

To say that a writer's hold on reality is tenuous is an understatement-it's like saying the Titanic had a rough crossing. Writer's build their own realities, move into them and occasionally send letters home. The only difference between a writer and a crazy person is that a writer gets paid for it.

The history of our times calls to mind those Walt Disney characters who rush madly over the edge of a cliff without seeing it, so that the power of their imagination keeps them suspended in mid-air; but as soon as they look down and see where they are, they fall.

I do not know how to distinguish between waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?

I don't tend to work directly from life, except in trying to mimic or match the outlines of its insanity. In other words, when I live through something, I just try to say to myself, "OK, remember this - life is really this crazy or scary or beautiful or surprising - so try to 'get at' that in your stories.

I'm always looking for something to engage my imagination and take me on a little mental voyage. I just want a new topic in my life.

But it's the truth even if it didn't happen.

It is only a short step from exaggerating what we can find in the world to exaggerating our power to remake the world.

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.