Michael Frayn Quotes

There is no standard for truth. We cannot even agree on the meaning of words.

An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.

Whatever you say it is, it isn't.

Words are slippery and thoughts are vicious.

I begin to see an object when I cease to understand it.

We believe what we see.’...What do you do when you’re in the dark?

Dude, are my eyes seeing what my brain is telling my eyes that they're seeing?

Out of the corner of one eye, I could see my mother. Out of the corner of the other eye, I could see her shadow on the wall, cast there by the lamplight. It was a big and solid shadow, and it looked so much like my mother that I became frightened. For I could not be sure whether for the rest of my life I would be able to tell when it was really my mother and when it was really her shadow standing between me and the rest of the world.

I don't really believe anything I say. Because the nature of my work concerns the spaces between the words, rather than the words themselves.

I was once told by someone wise that writing is perilous as you cannot always guarantee your words will be read in the spirit in which they were written.

Who knew three dots could make such a difference? Like everything else, a love or a wish or whatever, it was all in the way you read it.

Watt's concern, deep as it appeared, was not after all what the figure was, in reality, but with what the figure appeared to be, in reality.

Sometimes I don't know whether I'm thening or nowing.

My doubts stand in a circle around every word, I see them before I see the word, but what then! I do not see the word at all, I invent it.

People like to say, 'What do you mean exactly?' I would answer, 'I mean, but not exactly.'

I wasn't sure if the word boys should mean dim or incomprehensible. I was hovering between the two, with a healthy dose of testosterone-poisoned.

Isn't telling about something-using words, English or Japanese-already something of an invention? Isn't just looking upon this world already something of an invention?

Why, you might just as well say that, I see what I eat, is the same as, I eat what I see.

I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.

... no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp.

Who can really distinguish between the sea and what's reflected in it? Or tell the difference between the falling rain and loneliness?

Lord Polonius: What do you read, my lord? Hamlet: Words, words, words. Lord Polonius: What is the matter, my lord? Hamlet: Between who? Lord Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.

Individual words, sounds, squiggles on paper with no meanings other than those with which our imagination can clothe them.

What's so astonishing about not understanding? There are so many things in art, beginning with art itself, that one doesn't understand. A painter doesn't see everything that he has put in his painting.

It is a universal condition of the enjoyable that the mind must believe in the existence of a law, and yet have a mystery to move about in.