Gore Vidal Quotes

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

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

Reason is the illusion of reality

It's funny how humans can wrap their mind around things and fit them into their version of reality.

Who’s to say that it takes something like a drug to mess with your perception of reality? How did Hitler deceive a nation? How can one group of people look at the world and see one thing, and another see something completely different? One sees a town, another sees a desert. One sees beauty, another sees chaos.” The skin of this world,” he said quietly.

We know nothing accurately in reality, but [only] as it changes according to the bodily condition, and the constitution of those things that flow upon [the body] and impinge upon it.

More important than innate disposition, objective experience, and environment is the subjective evaluation of these. Furthermore, this evaluation stands in a certain, often strange, relation to reality.

For a sorcerer, reality, or the world as we all know it, is only a description.

Consensual reality is both fragile and elastic, and it heals like the skin of a bubble.

I grasp reality, but sometimes I like to choke it into submission.

They all sort of get mixed up in my head, to be quite honest. They're all dealing with similar things. It's about how you deal with reality, by ignoring it sometimes, reinventing it other times, and that's how you get through it.

Reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable.

There is always a divergence between our perception and what actually exists.

Reality is what we want it to be or what we do not want it to be, but it is not our wanting or our not wanting that makes it so.

Consensus reality seemed like a dull, dead-end street compared to the intense, mutable reality of visions or whatever they were - neurological misfires. I expected life to be full of sudden, inexplicable surprises. When these things didn't happen for a while, life seemed dull and painful.

My mother isn't crazy. She simply has a harder time than most reconciling her reality with everyone else's reality.

Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other.

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

Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.

Your mind doesn't know the difference between reality and fantasy. Your mindacts on what you feed it. Feed it good thoughts.

People assume that they perceive reality as it is, that our senses accurately record the outside world. Yet the science suggests that, in important ways, people experience reality not as it is, but as they expect it to be.

It is the bane and the balm of individual perception that 'objective' reality is seen through the filter of each person's temperament.

Why all these signs around us that make me doubt language and submerge me in meanings, drowning reality instead of extracting it from the imaginary?

Contact with reality is not an all-or-nothing condition.

When you get down to the bottom of it, only about half of what we remember really happened. We tend to modify things to make ourselves look better in our own eyes and in the eyes of others. Then, if what we did wasn't really very admirable, we tend to forget that it ever happened. A normal human being's grasp on reality is very tenuous at best. Our imaginary lives are usually much nicer.