Thom Mayne Quotes

If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.

Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.

Reality: What a concept!

It is not important whether or not the interpretation is correct-- if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.

Identity is invariably false to facts.

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

All of us create our own versions of an event, of our lives, even, not because we're liars, necessarily, but because we can only see and understand the truth from our own viewpoint, and a shifting viewpoint at that.

What is reality, anyway? Just a collective hunch.

I like the idea that we build up these walls or rules or laws to maintain our reality, and when they fall away, you're left with a whole bunch of illusions.

In Modernism, reality used to validate media. In Postmodernism, the media validate reality. If you don't believe this, just think how many times you've described some real event as being 'just like a movie.'

The world ultimately is what we say it is.

The truth is whatever people will believe is the truth.

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.

Most people, they get overwhelmed by the religious stories, the nationalist stories, by the economic stories of the day, and take these stories to be the reality.

Myth-making is absolutely necessary to create the simplified images that people live off.

Our identities really are a constant negotiation between the story we tell about ourselves and the narrative our societies like to recite.

Reality is mind-made.

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

Reality is fabricated out of desire.

In the past we have always assumed that the external world around us has represented reality, however confusing or uncertain, and that the inner world of our minds, its dreams, hopes, ambitions, represented the realm of fantasy, and the imagination. These roles, it seems to me, have been reversed. The most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume that it is a complete fiction - conversely, the one small node of reality left to us is inside of our own heads.

One of the things I had to really wrap my head around is I have no control over what people call me: advocate, activist, gay, Filipino, undocumented person, gay person with an Asian face and Latino name.

The deeper reality is that I’m not sure if what I do is real. I usually believe that I’m certain about how I feel, but that seems naive. How do we know how we feel?…There is almost certainly a constructed schism between (a) how I feel, and (b) how I think I feel. There’s probably a third level, too—how I want to think I feel.

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.

Truth is created, not discover!

I'm not ugly, but my beauty is a total creation.