Emma Donoghue Quotes

Heaven lies about us in our infancy and the world begins lying about us pretty soon afterward.

You know what ART stands for? Above Real Truth.

something can only become an illusion after disillusionment. before that, it is something real. what caused the disillusionment? no one told me the print on the wall was just ink and paper and had no life of its own. at some point the cat stopped blinking, and i stopped thinking it could.

To visualize is to see what is not there, what is not real - a dream. To visualize is, in fact, to make visual lies. Visual lies, however, have a way of coming true.

But an Adrian also knew that an Adrian's lies were real: they were lived and felt and acted out as thoroughly as another man's truths - if other men had truths - and he believed it possible that this last lie might see him through to the grave.

Illusions are hazardous, and so are disillusions.

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.

Long ago, I became more interested in the real world than in make-believe.

Lost Illusion is the undisclosed title of every novel.

The theater itself is a lie. Its deaths are mere special effects. Its tales never happened. Even the histories are distorted for dramatic effect. The theater is unnatural, a place of imagination. But the theater tells the audience something true: that the world requires judgments.

There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.

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

A deception that elevates us is dearer than a host of low truths.

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

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined.

Truth is always a delusion.

They say the camera never lies. It lies every day.

The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.

Art has a double face, of expression and illusion, just like science has a double face: the reality of error and the phantom of truth.

The truth is always less interesting than the fiction.

I have the terrible feeling that, because I am wearing a white beard and am sitting in the back of the theatre, you expect me to tell you the truth about something. These are the cheap seats, not Mount Sinai.

For a moment, the lie becomes truth.

The camera cannot lie. But it can be an accessory to untruth.

Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.