Rainer Werner Fassbinder Quotes

I've always preferred mythology to history. History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality.

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

The truth is always less interesting than the fiction.

Some stories are true that never happened.

We live in our myths, we only endure reality.

You call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.

The images of things are not the things in themselves.

Realism is a corruption of reality.

A thing is not what you say it is or what you photograph it to be or what you paint it to be or what you sculpt it to be. Words, photographs, paintings, and sculptures are symbols of what you see, think, and feel things to be, but they are not the things themselves.

The reality is the picture, it is most certainly not in the picture.

The map appears to us more real than the land.

Just because something is a metaphor doesn't mean it can't be real.

Because you continue to inhabit and believe your metaphors, you cannot see what is true.

We have these images, these icons before us that are not reality.

The difference between a Miracle and a Fact is exactly the difference between a mermaid and a seal.

What flows into you from myth is not truth but reality (truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is), and therefore, every myth becomes the father of innumerable truths on the abstract level.

The idea that myth is the opposite of knowledge, or the opposite of truth, is simply to disallow it. It is like saying poetry is the opposite of truth.

In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

Legends die hard. They survive as truth rarely does.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.

The difference between reality and unreality is that reality has so little to recommend it.

Sometimes my art is just an illusion - or is it?