John Banville Quotes

The world consists of images on a screen, and consciousness is the steady light that emanates from the projector.

The world is not made of anti-mu mesons, quarks, and photons, and electromagnetic fields. Reality is made of words.

We think that the world is a solid, vivid place, full of shape and colour and solid objects like this table and this microphone and so on, but we actually create that in our heads out of the bits of information that hit the back of our eyeballs or hit our eardrums or hit our tongues or whatever.

We think we receive all that we perceive, but in fact, we actually give the sky its colour.

The real world is much smaller than the imaginary

I recognise a distinction between dream life and real life, between appearances and actualities. I confess to an over-powering desire to know whether I am asleep or awake--whether the environment and laws which affect me are external and permanent, or the transitory products of my own brain.

The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.

Civilization consists in giving something an unfitting name, then dream about the result. And indeed the false name and the real dream create a new reality. The object really becomes another, because we turned it into another one. We manufacture realities.

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.

What rules the world is idea, because ideas define the way reality is perceived.

In the end, it is my belief, words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense.

Matter is simply a concept. The world is made of language.

We are taught what reality is in all kinds of ways.

A reality completely independent of the spirit that conceives it, sees it, or feels it, is an impossibility. A world so external as that, even if it existed, would be forever inaccessible to us.

I realized either I was crazy or the world was crazy; and I picked on the world. And of course I was right.

The world is mental in some way that we do not yet understand, but that which we're edging toward understanding. And the world is made of language. I can't say that enough. Whenever we get into these discussions about reality, or effects in space and time, we are operating outside this assumption that the world is made of language.

Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?

Certain mystes aver that the real world has been constructed by the human mind, since our ways are governed by the artificial categories into which we place essentially undifferentiated things, things weaker than our words for them. We believe we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges.

The world in your mind is as real as the world outside of it.

Reality became for me a problem after my experience with LSD. Before, I had believed there was only one reality, the reality of everyday life. Just one true reality and the rest was imagination and was not real. But under the influence of LSD, I entered into realities which were as real and even more real than the one of everyday. And I thought about the nature of reality and I got some deeper insights.

I have a feeling Virtual Reality will further expose the conceit that 'reality' is a fact. It will provide another reminder of the seamless continuity between the world outside and the world within, delivering another major hit to the old fraud of objectivity. 'Real,' as Kevin Kelly put it, 'is going to be one of the most relative words we'll have.'

In some way there is no real life. It's always the story of your life that you're living.

It obviously makes a difference whether we consider ourselves as pawns in a game whose rules we call reality or as players of the game who know that the rules are ‘real’ only to the extent that we have created or accepted them, and that we can change them.

Is it the world that says I am real, or is it you?

Of course you're real-like any thought or any story. It's real when you're in it.