Max Joseph Quotes

It was easy to idealize someone you barely knew.

It's not only imagination, it's the distortion of the vision. You suddenly think, This person is idealistic, this person is strong, this person has dreams, when you know better most of the time. You put what you want to see on people.

It doesn't matter that the way of life shown by Hollywood was phony. It helped you hope.

When I was a kid, we actually lived in a house that had been divided in two at one point, which meant that one room in our house opened up onto a brick wall. And I was convinced all I had to do was just open it the right way and it wouldn't be a brick wall. So I'd sidle over to the door and I'd pull it open.

Believing you're something that you're not excites the mind and the imagination. And it's hopeful.

There's something about shadows because you make your own mind up about what's lurking in them.

I think we simply all like to project ourselves into somebody else - somebody who is better-looking, richer, smarter. It's comforting. It's escapism, and that, of course, is what the movies are supposed to be all about. Ultimately, I think it's just part of human nature to pretend.

The land of literature is a fairy land to those who view it at a distance, but, like all other landscapes, the charm fades on a nearer approach, and the thorns and briars become visible.

A lot of our assumptions of the world are fairly cynical, fairly negative, and assume the worst. What our reading tastes show - in this rush to fantasy, romance, whatever - is that we actually still want to believe in a world of possibility, in a world of mystery.

My favorite actors are people who I don't know anything about, and I can project any character onto them.

It's so easy for us to misperceive and see the things in others that we want to see. And, when we're wrong, and often we're dead wrong, we miss the truth.

That's what fantasies are for, to help us imagine that things are better than they are.

Men project their fantasies onto me; they live them through who they think I am.

When we look at something that is alien to us, that is beyond our comprehension, what do we see but ourselves?

I don't know what that weid fantasy is that makes people go, "Oh, you must have had a great childhood."

Guys are great before you know who they are,' said Lucy. 'They're great when you're still with who they might be.

I am happy to report that in the war between reality and romance, reality is not the stronger.

Men are always doomed to be duped, not so much by the arts of the other as by their own imagination. They are always wooing goddesses, and marrying mere mortals.

No fiction, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs - this is how Irie imagined her homeland. Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into language.

I want to see everything. I guess the positive version of not seeing or not knowing would be preservation of fantasy.

Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.

Whatever is unknown is magnified.

Because nothing is as good as you can imagine it. No one is as beautiful as she is in your head. Nothing is as exciting as your fantasy.