Reality Manipulation Quotes

It's not denial. I'm just selective about the reality I accept.

The truly unique trait of 'Sapiens' is our ability to create and believe fiction. All other animals use their communication system to describe reality. We use our communication system to create new realities. Of course, not all fictions are shared by all humans, but at least one has become universal in our world, and this is money.

For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.

If you DJ reality, that is, if you make a mash-up of actual reality, you're going to end up with something that inevitably people will say, "This is feminist." Because you cannot avoid that.

This girl: she bent reality around her like a lens bending light, she pleated it into so many flickering layers that you could never tell which one you were looking at, the longer you stared the dizzier you got.

All craftsmen share a knowledge. They have heldReality down fluttering to a bench.

Time slowed and reality bent; on and on the eggman went.

There was a sky somewhere above the tops of the buildings, with stars and a moon and all the things there are in a sky, but they were content to think of the distant street lights as planets and stars. If the lights prevented you from seeing the heavens, then preform a little magic and change reality to fit the need. The street lights were now planets and stars and moon.

And so while dreams are the individual man's play with reality, the sculptor's art is (in a broader sense) the play with dreams.

Overall, looking at the stories [Black Mirror], almost every story we've ever done is concerned with authenticity or reality in some way.

Possible reality [is obtained] by slightly bending physical and chemical laws.

What magicians we are, turning darkness into light, transforming invisible atoms into dazzling theater of the world, pulling objects, (people as well as rabbits) out of secret microscopic closets, turning winter into summer, making a palmful of moments disappear through time's trap door. We learned the methods so long ago that they're unconscious, and we've hypnotized ourselves into believing that we're the audience, so I wonder where we served our apprenticeship. Under what master magicians did we learn to form reality so smoothly that we forgot to tell ourselves the secret?

Reality is negotiable.

Nothing's real unless you want it to be, and anything can be real if you want it to enough; so real doesn't really mean anything.

I wish I had the power to flip my reality upside down like an hourglass, and that life wasn't a finite affair, but rather a perpetually recurring passage through a hole in time.

I am in the Matrix and I just took the blue pill.

What's real? What's not? That's what I do in my act, test how other people deal with reality.

The real distinction is between those who adapt their purposes to reality and those who seek to mold reality in the light of their purposes.

I came from the school of cinema verite documentaries, which was: Do not manipulate reality as it was happening but create a narrative in the editing room.

In politics, manipulating reality can take presidence over finding reality.

With photography, I like to create a fiction out of reality. I try and do this by taking society's natural prejudice and giving this a twist.

You have to start somewhere. You can always erase reality later on.

[Doctor Strange] gets scraped off the floor and then thrown right down to hell again and then slowly pulls himself back up.

We're filling a big universe [in Doctor Strange], and so the look and the sort of plasticity of us is really important to us when we're striking poses here. It's very important, it's really great.

If deliberate distortion of reality by corporate media could be effectively prosecuted in the United States, the entire industry would be behind bars.