Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover’s war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.
A real writer is always shifting and changing and searching.
If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they’re real for you whether they’re real or not.
Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.
The writer’s only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.
The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.
Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.
The man watched him. Real life is pretty bad? What do you think? Well, I think we’re still here. A lot of bad things have happened but we’re still here. Yeah. You don’t think that’s so great. It’s okay.
Maybe. Anyway, some men get what they want. No man. Or perhaps only briefly so as to lose it. Or perhaps only to prove to the dreamer that the world of his longing made real is no longer that world at all.
Not all dying words are true and this blessing is no less real for being shorn of its ground.
Real life is only ever just real life. Messy. What it means depends on how you look at it. The only thing you’ve got to do is find a way to live there.
Know yourself and go in swinging, if it hurts when you hit, it might be real, too.
There ain’t nothing good that don’t got real bad waiting to follow it.
Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.
Nothing ever becomes real till experienced – even a proverb is no proverb until your life has illustrated it.
I have a habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am now leading a posthumous existence.
Real are the dreams of gods, and soothly pass their pleasures in a long immortal dream.
I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad.
By his monstrous way of life he seemed to have put himself beyond the limits of reality. Nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard it in an echo of the infuriated cries within him.
When you start to doubt yourself the real world will eat you alive.