For a book to function... it has to be a functioning reality. The character has to be real, and I imagine that's exactly what happens for a spy who is in deep cover.

My family was my guide to my reality.

Just because you don't believe in something doesn't mean its not real

Self respect and reality is tough rival when it comes to balance it honestly.

You had to be there to see what it looked like. They live in a dream, and we live in a nightmare.

Take the word for it of a man who has made his way inch by inch, and does not believe that we'll wake up to find our work done because we've lain all night a-dreaming of it; anything worth doing is...

A man may beg, but a woman has to sell.

...one could accept Muhammad as a genuine mystic-just as one could accept Joan of Arc's voices as having genuinely been heard by her, or the revelations of Saint John the Divine as being that troubled...

Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.

He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the words and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or...

A writing may be lost; a lie may be written; but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind!

The trick, he supposed, was never to lose sight of the theoretical possibility while not for a moment taking the idea remotely seriously.

It could all be unreal - how could you ever tell otherwise? You took it on trust, in part because what would be the point of doing anything else? When the fake behaved exactly like the real, why treat...

I have never distinguished readily between thinking and dreaming. I know my life would be much different if I could ever say, This I have learned from my senses, while that I have merely imagined.

I discovered at an early age that I was - shall we be kind and say different? It's a better, more general word than the other one... I got sick... It was the feeling that the great, deadly pointing...

For several days, I slept. Whether this was a necessary part of physical recovery, or a stubborn retreat from waking reality, I do not know, but I woke only reluctantly to take a little food, falling...

Hope and reality lie in inverse proportions.

If you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it's not because they enjoy solitude. It's because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.

Time spent in India has a extraordinary effect on one. It acts as a barrier that makes the rest of the world seem unreal.

I'm not afraid to die. What I'm afraid of is having reality get the better of me, of having reality leave me behind.

Where I'm living is not a storybook world. It's the real world, full of gaps and inconsistencies and anticlimaxes.

If only I could fallsound asleep and wake up in my old reality!

It's just that you're about to do something out of the ordinary. And after you do something like that, the everyday look of things might seem to change a little. Things may look different to you than...

In dreams you don't need to make any distinctions between things. Not at all. Boundaries don't exist. So in dreams there are hardly ever collisions. Even if there are, they don't hurt. Reality is...

Books are the best resources - private, discreet, reliable - to step over reality.

Between the approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a small gap of the unimaginable, and it was this hiatus that gave him no rest.

Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence. Time and distance blur the edges; then suddenly the beloved has...

The heresy of an age of reason,' or some such slovos {words}. 'I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong.

Dreams can be of value even if you don't have an opportunity to turn them into reality.

I felt a tremendous distance between myself and everything real.