Tennessee Williams Quotes

We accept reality so readily - perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.

The only thing that is fundamental (real) is consciousness itself; all else is virtual- i.e., a result of an exchange of information within consciousness.

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.

Is it the world that says I am real, or is it you?

Now that's a concept that's always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world - we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us. But clearly these people have a far more tightly circumscribed definition of reality, one that I find deeply mysterious, and an almost pathologically intense need to bring others into line with that definition.

I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.

Who is to say what is real and what is not?'Real' is a distinction of a naïve mind.

Art exists because reality is neither real nor significant.

The problem is one of opposition between subjective and objective points of view. There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality. But often what appears to a more subjective point of view cannot be accounted for in this way. So either the objective conception of the world is incomplete, or the subjective involves illusions that should be rejected.

[D]oes the real world have any more substance than visions and hallucinations when we're having them? At any given moment, what's happening in our minds is all and everything that happens.

Our consciousness is our contribution to reality. What we perceive as real, becomes real.

What reality was ever made by realists?

You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Paty, which is collective and immortal.

Reality became for me a problem after my experience with LSD. Before, I had believed there was only one reality, the reality of everyday life. Just one true reality and the rest was imagination and was not real. But under the influence of LSD, I entered into realities which were as real and even more real than the one of everyday. And I thought about the nature of reality and I got some deeper insights.

You say they create their own reality," said Veronika, "but what is reality?

I have a feeling Virtual Reality will further expose the conceit that 'reality' is a fact. It will provide another reminder of the seamless continuity between the world outside and the world within, delivering another major hit to the old fraud of objectivity. 'Real,' as Kevin Kelly put it, 'is going to be one of the most relative words we'll have.'

My friends, I tell you repeatedly that the illusion that Life creates is very, very intelligent. The illusion itself is intelligent! Just understand how intelligent the intelligence must be in order to create an intelligent illusion. The intelligent illusion is so intelligent it will appear real to man every moment of his daily life!

We do live, all of us, on many different levels, and for most artists the world of imagination is more real than the world of the kitchen sink.

Reality is a question of perspective.

I began to wonder whether anything truly existed, whether reality wasn't an unformed and gelatinous substance only half-captured by my senses....If that were true, each of us was living in absolute isolation. The thought terrified me. I was consoled by the idea that I could take that gelatin and mold it to create anything I wanted...At times I felt that the universe fabricated from the power of the imagination had stronger and more lasting contours than the blurred realm of the flesh-and-blood creatures around me.

Fantasy is often closer to reality than what most people accept as reality.

Or -- and this she knew was a far more accurate way of looking at it -- the book was true and reality was lying.

If you make things too real, sometimes you bring it down to the mundane.

Of course you're real-like any thought or any story. It's real when you're in it.

All life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other.