Mary McCarthy Quotes

What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake. If you're interested in the cake, you get rather annoyed with people saying what species the real plum was.

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.

I am putting real plums into an imaginary cake.

I just love writing. It's magical, it's somewhere else to go, it's somewhere much more dreadful, somewhere much more exciting. Somewhere I feel I belong, possibly more than in the so-called real world.

You do a drama, and you are limited by the rules of reality, and in science fiction, you create your own reality. Some people find that daunting; I find it challenging.

Do you not see with your own eyes the chrysalis fact assume by degrees the wings of fiction?

Film sets are constantly amusing because you really are creating something that is so very surreal, and I kind of like that.

I feel that entertainment happens when fact and fiction is balanced.

With photography, you've captured a moment time - it's that moment only - and in painting, you play with it; you manipulate how time is presented. It's about fantasy and illusion and the creation of desire.

Acting is illusion, as much illusion as magic is - and not so much a matter of being real.

The real world is much smaller than the imaginary

My pictures are about getting as far away from reality as possible. Dreams should be part of our everyday life.

The imaginary is what tends to become real.

You know what ART stands for? Above Real Truth.

What's poetry? It's not real but maybe it's more than real. It's dreaming while you're awake.

Nothin’s real scary except in books.

I have never looked for dream in reality or reality in dream. I have allowed my imagination free play, and I have not been led astray by it.

If there was no risk, it wouldn't be art. It wouldn't be worth making. There is risk even in a fairy tale. Fiction is closest to pure narrative, and pure narrative is simply the logic we try to impose on an ever-changing reality.

You can do anything when it's not real.

You're making a fantasy. You're making something real out of a fantasy. And then it no longer exists. It's heartbreaking to leave behind. I was devastated after Waiting for Guffman. I had never gotten so close to people I've worked with.

...we shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail among sacred islands of the mad till death shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real.

My whole art is based on escaping life and reality, which might not the best tendency to have when you're trying to be a good person in general. But people can escape into my world easily - artists are supposed to create a keyhole that people can look into.

"Well, it's no use your talking about waking him," said Tweedledum, "when you're only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you're not real."

The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.

One of the great things about cartoons is that they're not real - you're not watching real people and it engages your imagination. One of the cornerstones of America is that we are creative thinkers. We're innovators.