Cormac McCarthy Quotes

Anything processed by memory is fiction.

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

The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror.

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

There is no truth. There is only perception.

In polling, truth is what people perceive.

One's memories aren't what actually happened - they're very subjective. You can always make it much better, right?

I think what happens is when we start to look at the facts, everybody has their impression of what truth is.

We're completely confused about the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. To me, the moment you compose, you're fictionalising; the moment you remember, you're dreaming. It's ludicrous that we have to pretend that non-fiction has to be real in some absolute sense.

Reason is the illusion of reality

We make our own truths and lies....Truths are often lies and lies truths.

Reality is what we want it to be or what we do not want it to be, but it is not our wanting or our not wanting that makes it so.

Reality can easily become the current fantasy.

We can never be quite clear whether we are referring to the world as it is or to the world as we see it.

Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other.

There is no way you can use the word “reality” without quotation marks around it.

You don't remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.

But the truth doesn't need to be known, or believed, to be true.

Reality is a question of perspective.

People make their own reality. That was what Praxis had taught him years ago. A hundred people can witness the exact same event, and give two hundred and three different accountings of it.

If truth is not acceptable, it becomes the imagination of others.

Truth and dreams are always getting muddled.

In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.

And for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream. But things that many see may have no taste or moment in them at all, and things that are shown only to one may be spears and water-spouts of truth from the very depth of truth.