I was playing a part of someone dealing dope on a street corner - and there was a guy actually dealing heroin right there. I looked at him, he looked at me, and I got real confused.
Surrogate experience and surrogate environments have become the American way of life. Distinctions are no longer made, or deemed necessary, between the real and the false; the edge usually goes to the latter, as an improved version with defects corrected - accessible and user-friendly.
You can begin to see an amalgamation of cultures, the real beginning of one world. Ten years ago, it would have been impossible to imagine a Cockney singing group with a Southern Negro style and Indian and electronic music. I wonder if people have even noticed what a tremendous cultural signal the Beatles are.
As we live through thousands of dreams in our present life, so is our present life only one of many thousands of such lives which we enter from the other more real life and then return after death. Our life is but one of the dreams of that more real life, and so it is endlessly, until the very last one, the very real the life of God.
A principal fruit of friendship, is the ease and discharge of the fullness and swellings of the heart, which passions of all kinds do cause and induce.
When we hear (as we sometimes do) that (Russia's) economic output is about half the level of a decade ago or that real incomes have fallen sharply, it is worth recalling that economic statistics under the Soviet Union were hardly more reliable than any other official statements. Moreover, a country that produces what no one wants to buy, and whose workers receive wages that they cannot use to buy goods they want, is hardly in the best of economic health.
Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background, the countless minor scenes and interiors of the secession war; and it is best they should not. The real war will never get in the books.
The work in Iraq is difficult and it is dangerous. Like most Americans, I see the images of violence and bloodshed. Every picture is horrifying, and the suffering is real.
An echo is a good way to describe the photogram, which is a visual echo of the real object. That's why I like to work with the photogram, because the contact with what is represented is actual. It's as if the border between the world and the print is osmotic.
When we meet real tragedy in life, we can react in two ways - either by losing hope and falling into self-destructive habits, or by using the challenge to find our inner strength.
Like all very handsome men who die tragically, he left not so much a character behind him as a legend. Youth and death shed a halo through which it is difficult to see a real face.