Joshua Prager Quotes

People see stories everywhere...We take random events and we put them together in a pattern so we can comfort ourselves with a story, no matter how much it obviously isn't true...We have to lie to ourselves to live. Otherwise, we'd go crazy.

We all want explanations for why we behave as we do and for the ways the world around us functions. Even when our feeble explanations have little to do with reality. We’re storytelling creatures by nature, and we tell ourselves story after story until we come up with an explanation that we like and that sounds reasonable enough to believe. And when the story portrays us in a more glowing and positive light, so much the better.

The relationship between the imagined and the real is more complicated than people imagine.

We try to organize the world, which isn't organized the way our brains want to organize it. We tell stories about the people in our lives, we project ideas onto them. We project relationships with people, we make our lives into stories. I don't think we can avoid doing that.

Rationalization is a cover-up, a process of providing one's emotions with a false identity, of giving them spurious explanations and justifications - in order to hide one's motives, not just from others, but primarily from oneself. The price of rationalizing is the hampering, the distortion, and, ultimately, the destruction of one's cognitive faculty. Rationalization is a process not of perceiving reality, but of attempting to make reality fit one's emotions.

Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead.

The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.

We can distance ourselves from the reality of what we did through storytelling.

I guess when I'm frightened or in pain or maybe very bored I've tried to hold myself together by imposing a narrative order on the experience as it happens.

We have to lie to ourselves to live. Otherwise, we'd go crazy.

If I behave as though this is a completely normal situation, then maybe it will be.

We can't live in a state of perpetual doubt, so we make up the best story possible and we live as if the story were true.

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.

Denial, perhaps, is a necessary human mechanism to cope with the heartaches of life.

Narrating incredible things as though they were real old system; narrating realities as though they were incredible the new.

Reality is not always probable, or likely. But if you're writing a story, you have to make it as plausible as you can, because if not, the reader's imagination will reject it.

Every generation of humans believed it had all the answers it needed, except for a few mysteries they assumed would be solved at any moment. And they all believed their ancestors were simplistic and deluded. What are the odds that you are the first generation of humans who will understand reality ?

To ensure that our views are credible, our brain accepts what our eye sees. To ensure that our views are positive, our eye looks for what our brain wants. The conspiracy between these two servants allows us to live at the fulcrum of stark reality and comforting illusion.

You can't live without illusions, even if you must fight for them.

People have a habit of inventing fictions they will believe wholeheartedly in order to ignore the truth they cannot accept.

Most mistakes in philosophy and logic occur because the human mind is apt to take the symbol for the reality.

Just as we tend to assume that the world is as we see it, we naively suppose that people are as we imagine them to be.

We manufacture anger to give ourselves the illusion of power when we feel weak and helpless.

When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.

Sometimes I wanted to believe something so badly, I deliberately manufactured excuses and ignored painful reality.