Terry Gilliam Quotes

I think the measure of your success to a certain extent will be the amount of things written about you that aren't true.

Truth is stranger than nonfiction. And life is too interesting to be left to journalists. People have stories, but journalists have 'takes,' and it's their takes that usually win out when the stories are too complicated or, as happens, not complicated enough.

I know a lot of people think, 'She's so glamorous.' But that's really not me at all.

I don't read the magazines that make things up about people. I know what the truth is. I don't sort of indulge in my own fodder. I don't really care what they write about me.

Image is what people perceive my life to be. It's nothing like the truth.

Everyone knows a lot about me without actually knowing me at all.

My reality is the misconceptions about me.

I'm interested in such things as the difference between how we perceive the world and what the world turns out to be. The difference is between the stories we tell others and the stories we tell ourselves. There is a wonderful Russian saying, which I use as the epigraph of one of my novels, which goes, He lies like an eyewitness. Which is very sly, clever and true.

I don't really believe in stories, only in the people who tell them.

I happen to be notorious. That, I have no control over.

The first 20 stories written about a public figure set the tone for the next 2,000 and it is almost impossible to reverse it.

I understand people have preconceived notions of who I am or what I do.

My personal life is in the spotlight, but people say what they want to say. The truth isn't in the spotlight, I should say. I'm in the spotlight, but not the truth.

Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.

A single lie destroys a whole reputation of integrity.

Once you get into something so big, people think of you in one way.

To be honest, my life is not really as way-out and myth-loaded as people like to portray it.

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

I read all the time that people think I'm arrogant. They say I am cocky, a bad character. I had that from a young age. But when they meet me, they say, 'That image doesn't fit you.'

I always felt journalists had a very clear idea of what they wanted to write about me before the interview began.

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

Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.

Fame is a series of misunderstandings surrounding a name.

The truth is always less interesting than the fiction.

Maybe I'm misjudging people, but I feel like a lot of people still have an image of me in a bonnet at nine years old.