Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

Truth and dreams are always getting muddled.

Some things, you know, if you say them, it makes them not true?

Strange to dream in the right shape and build in the wrong shape, but maybe that is what we do every day, never believing that a dream could tell the truth.

I tell myself that I know you, and then when I think about it, I realize that I don't.

This can't be true but I remember it.

You see, if you make believe hard enough that something is true, then it is true for you.

Most people like to live in illusions.

We all not only could know everything. We do. We just tell ourselves we don't to make it all bearable.

I realize that nothing's as it seems.

I feel like I've dreamed half of my life that hasn't happened yet, so a lot of times I'm going along, and I do stuff, and I know that I've done it. I have deja vus more than I have regular experiences. If half of your day is a deja vu, then you start to wonder, 'What is real and what isn't?'

People say I have a distorted lens. I think I see things as they really are.

It gets scary when you're dealing with people who don't know how to separate fact from fiction.

The future is, of course, imaginary - an unreal place that I create from my expectations, which are made from my remembered experiences, especially repeated experiences.

You're surprised by something, but you don't really know what surprised you; you recognize someone, but you don't really know what cues cause you to recognize that person.

I've studied pathological liars, and anything they say, they believe, and that's one of the reasons they're so convincing, because they have no connection with the truth. It's a dead issue. It's like they're color-blind to the truth. So anything that comes out of their mouths is their reality.

I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.

I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.

Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then.

We live in a world of denial, and we don't know what the truth is anymore.

Your senses are reeling all the time. Finally you find something to write and the very next day you go out and see something else which totally contradicts what you've written and every conclusion you've come to.

There is no truth. There is only perception.

You have an idea of the way you think it is, and it's not that way at all, it's something else.

Most people live in a myth and grow violently angry if anyone dares to tell them the truth about themselves.

Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty.

Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups...So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.