I don't think I'll ever escape the fact that I don't belong anywhere in particular. I've often dreamed about going back to Nigeria, but that's a very romantic notion. It's a hideous country to go to in reality.

I'd like to classify my life as a romantic comedy. Unfortunately I feel it's probably more like a TV reality show.

My home is attached to a study - in fact, my home is my study, and I have a little room to sleep in. I need to write looking onto the street or a landscape. Looking at reality from some distance gives me romantic visions.

The aspect of kind of living in your imagination and creating a more romantic vision of the world than the reality that you're given - that's definitely something I can sort of relate to.

The curse of the romantic is a greed for dreams, an intensity of expectation that, in the end, diminishes the reality.

Romantic love is mental illness. But it's a pleasurable one. It's a drug. It distorts reality, and that's the point of it. It would be impossible to fall in love with someone that you really saw.

In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.

I love the idea of the teachings of Jesus Christ and the beautiful stories about it, which I loved in Sunday school and I collected all the little stickers and put them in my book. But the reality is that organised religion doesn't seem to work. It turns people into hateful lemmings and it's not really compassionate.

Then there is the further question of what is the relationship of thinking to reality. As careful attention shows, thought itself is in an actual process of movement.

Every relationship comes with a shelf life; that duration could be a minute or even a lifetime. If, for whatever reasons, a relationship cannot last a lifetime, contrary to what the two people imagined, then both the individuals have to be communicative and have to understand and accept the reality.

I am always interested in that relationship between outer reality and inner desire, and I think it is important to pay attention to the inner voice because it is the only way to discover your mission in life and the only way to develop the strength to break with whatever familial or cultural norms are preventing you from fulfilling your destiny.

See, if there is zero possessiveness in a relationship, then one needs to put a reality check to see if things are really going fine. So, normally, everyone is a bit possessive, and so am I.

It's the relationship I have with the world: always trying to escape from reality. I'm a daydreamer; I don't feel in harmony with my epoch or the societies I live in.

Assuming if there's such a thing as reality, if you have a false relationship with it, how can you do anything but fail?

Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.

Whence it follows that God is absolutely perfect, since perfection is nothing but magnitude of positive reality, in the strict sense, setting aside the limits or bounds in things which are limited.

Reality is not always dark or positive. It is somewhere in-between.

The more you are positive and say, 'I want to have a good life,' the more you build that reality for yourself by creating the life that you want.

The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.

I accept all interpretations of my films. The only reality is before the camera. Each film I make is kind of a return to poetry for me, or at least an attempt to create a poem.

Poetry is the deification of reality.

Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.

A few years ago, the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved bowls... saying that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl with curved sides because, gazing out, the fish would have a distorted view of reality. But how do we know we have the true, undistorted picture of reality?

Peace can be promoted by the limitation of arms and by the creation of the instrumentality for peaceful settlement of controversies. But it will become a reality only through self-restraint and active effort in friendliness and helpfulness.