So, we, as human beings, live in a very imprecise world. A world where our perceptions of reality are far more important than actual reality.

There's a flipside to this; if you as an individual have the right to live on your own terms, you must have the right to both succeed and fail on them.

Writers, all the good ones, are Natural Born Liars.

If there is a substantial difference between a gay couple and a childless heterosexual couple, I'm unable to see it.

So, we, as human beings, live in a very imprecise world. A world where our perceptions of reality are far more important than actual reality.

An attempt to write nothing but characterization will soon bog down; I for one don't want to have somebody tell me about someone else.

There are, believe it or not, good politicians.

Before Watergate and Viet Nam, the American public, as a whole, believed everything it was told, and since then it doesn't believe anything, and both of those extremes hurt us because they prevent us from recognizing the truth.

Actors are good liars; writers are good liars with good memories.

It's your body and your life and you have an absolute right to do with it as you choose.

Well, the future of the Internet is... Reality.

You want to balance the budget in this country? We change the salary structure for Congress and the President. Every year they don't balance the budget, we don't pay them.

There's no way for me to know, but my best guess, as it must be for everyone, is that other people are pretty much like me.

The universe is not fair and it is never going to be fair.

To write well you must be willing to go naked into the world.

What the power structure is afraid of is that we're going to learn to recognize the truth when we hear it.

It's very strange writing science fiction in a world that moves as fast as ours does.

The welfare system in the United States is vile.

If a liberal political philosophy stands for anything, and I am no longer sure it does, then it must mean that we are committed to the leveling of the playing field for everyone.

The most interesting thing about the idea of money is that it makes it possible to measure something in previous ages we couldn't be sure about, and that something is power.

You can have data without information, but you cannot have information without data.

Plot and character are virtually the same thing.

There is virtually nothing I wouldn't be willing to do, to try and make sure that children have a fair shake in life.

The reason Ronald Reagan gets slammed for having so badly exacerbated the problem of deficit spending is that he so plainly deserves it.

The federal debt in this country is principally of Republican design.

As a fiscal conservative, I think that our government should pay for itself.

Our species is on the verge of changes that will fundamentally alter what it means to be human... and we are the people driving that change.

We are reinventing the world. We've set the ball spinning with little concern for where and how it's going to stop.

I'm a liberal where children are concerned, a libertarian where adults are concerned - and thinking very seriously about running for the House of Representatives, for whatever that's worth.

Police do not belong in war zones.

It's obvious, but perhaps worth saying, that happiness has virtually nothing to do with the state of your intellect.

The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.

Arguably, no artist grows up: If he sheds the perceptions of childhood, he ceases being an artist.

So, we, as human beings, live in a very imprecise world. A world where our perceptions of reality are far more important than actual reality.

You become very angry and depressed that you keep getting offered only these exceedingly demure and repressed roles. They're so not me. That's why films like Fight Club were so important to me because I think I confounded certain stereotypes and limited perceptions of what I could do as an actress.

I have to struggle to change people's perceptions of me. I grew very frustrated with the perception that I'm this shy, retiring, inhibited aristocratic creature when I'm absolutely not like that at all. I think I'm much more outgoing and exuberant than my image.

No man has the right to dictate what other men should perceive, create or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions and emotions, and to build confidence in the creative spirit.

High office teaches decision making, not substance. It consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it. Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered; they learn how to make decisions but not what decisions to make.

I'm not interested in trying to work on people's perceptions. I am who I am, and if you don't take the time to learn about that, then your perception is going to be your problem.

Men act like brutes in so far as the sequences of their perceptions arise through the principle of memory only, like those empirical physicians who have mere practice without theory.

The perceptions of middle age have their own luminosity.

All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions.

It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.

Major social movements eventually fade into the landscape not because they have diminished but because they have become a permanent part of our perceptions and experience.

All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.

In a novel, I could submerge my ego in a character's and let his perceptions take over.

We think the Puritans always dressed in black and white, which they didn't. They loved very bright colors. And there were other differences in perceptions that gave one a very different view of them.

It's a well known thing that ordinary perceptions can have a strange aspect when one is travelling.

An actress must be a woman whose emotional perceptions are true, and to make them so, she must have a fine contempt for any art or thought that betrays them for something false.