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We play make believe, pretend to take ourselves and each other seriously--to love each other, hate each other--but then--it isn't true. It isn't true, we don't care at all!
Oct 1, 2025
I prefer shooting on location, just because it always helps you. You go some place, you put your life on hold even more than when you've settled in some place. You can make a new life so it opens yourself up to the make-believe and the imagination in a way when you aren't burdened by things that remind you of your life all the time.
My mom (Kate McCauley) is an actress, so I guess she's the one that taught me it was a possibility. For as long as I can remember, I've always played make-believe ... It's something that I've always done, that I've always been comfortable doing.
I'm a lucky guy. I get to sit around every day and indulge in make believe and get paid for it.
We are a nation of physical animals who have forgotten how much we enjoy being that. We are cushioned by this kind of make-believe, unreal world and have no idea what we can survive because we are never challenged or tested.
There is no alleviation for the sufferings of mankind except veracity of thought and of action, and the resolute facing of the world as it is when the garment of make-believe by which pious hands have hidden its uglier features is stripped off.
Either something is authentic or it is unauthentic, it is either false or true, make-believe or spontaneous life; yet here we are faced with a prevaricated truth and an authentic fake, hence a thing that is at once the truth and a lie.
I'm foremost an actor. I feel embarrassed being compared to the guys who really work at it. I fake it, I make believe I know all about it, which is what you're supposed to do as an actor.
Having children has helped me become a better actor because they remind you to play make believe. It's the ease and naturalness of their beings. They just play and it's completely real for them at the time. As an actor, if we do it well, we make you believe.
I've always felt that acting is acting at the end of the day, so whether you're doing comedy or heavy drama or anything else in between, you always have to bring a semblance of honesty to it. It's all make believe.
The drama is make-believe. It does not deal with truth but with effect.
Even in the world of make-believe there have to be rules. The parts have to be consistent and belong together.
I don't mean to sound grandiose, but there's something universal that you tap into with films like Feast of July and Schindler's List. You know they aren't make-believe. They illustrate something about life. This is my major concern whenever I select a film
How can a guy climb trees, say "Me, Tarzan, you, Jane", and make a million? The public forgives my acting because they know I was an athlete. They know I wasn't make-believe.
Art is a concrete and personal and rather childish thing after all - no matter what people do to graft it into science and make it sociological and psychological; it is no good at all unless it is let alone to be itself - a game of make-believe, or re-production, very exciting and delightful to people who have an ear for it or an eye for it.
It is among the ranks of school-age children, those six- to twelve-year-olds who once avidly filled their free moments with childhood play, that the greatest change is evident. In the place of traditional, sometimes ancient childhood games that were still popular a generation ago, in the place of fantasy and make- believe play . . . today's children have substituted television viewing and, most recently, video games.
Now, the essence, the very spirit of Christmas is that we first make believe a thing is so, and lo, it presently turns out to be so. - Stephen Leacockof Christmas trees around the house, so it smells good.
Now, the essence, the very spirit of Christmas is that we first make believe a thing is so, and lo, it presently turns out to be so.
I don't really enjoy working in TV, to be completely honest, even though it's incredibly lucrative, I'm just terrified of not being satiated in a myriad of different ways. It's amazing that I get to create every day, as an actor, or a director, or a writer, and I get to do it in a variety of different genres and worlds and characterizations. I think that's the great privilege of what we do, we get to make believe. I get to go to so many different places, try on different occupations, take on different points of view. That's what's always been sort of alluring.
If you live a life of make-believe, your life isn't worth anything until you do something that does challenge your reality. And to me, sailing the open ocean is a real challenge, because it's life or death.
Stargirl began to improvise. She flung her arms to a make-believe crowd like a celebrity on parade. She waggled her fingers at the stars. She churned her fists like an egg-beater. Every action echoed down the line behind her. The three hops of the bunny became three struts of a vaudeville vamp. Then a penguin waddle. Then tippy-toed priss. Every new move brought new laughter from the line.
"The Wolfpack" is a real life clash of life and fiction and the saving power of brotherhood and make-believe.
[The designated or chosen leader tries to] articulate and justify the resentment dammed up in the souls of the frustrated. He kindles the vision of a breathtaking future so as to justify the sacrifice of a transitory present. He stages the world of make-believe so indispensable for the realization of self-sacrifice and united action.
Theatre is, at its roots, some very brave people mutually consenting to a make believe world, with nothing but language to rest on.
This meal happened to be a make-believe tea, and they sat round the board guzzling in their greed; and really, what with their chatter and recriminations, the noise, as Wendy said, was positively deafening.
Most of the people I've been fortunate enough to work with all share the same passion for creativity, for ingenuity, for playing make-believe and really just having fun. It doesn't matter if we're blowing up cars, or shooting an emotional scene in a police station, deep inside we all know our imaginations are at work, and our imaginations are manifesting into reality - at least momentarily for the cameras to capture.
One of the great disadvantages of a literary or scriptural tradition like the biblical one is that a deity or context of deities becomes crystallized, petrified at a certain time and place. The deity doesn’t continue to grow, expand, or take into account new cultural forces and new realizations in the sciences, and the result is this make-believe conflict we have in our culture between science and religion.
Divisional exercise is a great game of make-believe.
There's a difference, you know, between faith and playing make-believe. One will make you grow. The other one will make you sleep.
But how ridiculous that I should bereft simply because I couldn’t spend hours in my world of make-believe! Wasn’t the reality of my life interesting enough? This is surely the time to let go of grievances, I told myself sternly. What good does it do to dwell on them? Brooding on a nest of grudges will only hatch more grief.
I never wore a stich of make-up until I got to America. I lived in a world of fantasy it was made up of imaginary friends and make believe lovers. I was also teased a lot for being different because I was shy, solitary, distant and melancholic.
And from the first moment that I ever walked on stage in front of a darkened auditorium with a couple of hundred people sitting there, I was never afraid, I was never fearful, I didn't suffer from stage fright, because I felt so safe on that stage. I wasn't Patrick Stewart, I wasn't in the environment that frightened me, I was pretending to be someone else, and I liked the other people I pretended to be. So I felt nothing but security for being on stage. And I think that's what drew me to this strange job of playing make-believe.
I love the theater. I love being on stage; I love the live audience. I also love dressing up and all of the make-believe.
I'm definitely excited by big ideas, both in what I write and what I read. Most days, reality is so mind-numbingly dull that I don't understand why someone would write strictly realistic stories, given the almost limitless freedom fiction provides. I don't see the point of making believe if you're not going to actually make believe: hang your ass out in the wind, push at every boundary, make almost unreasonable demands on your reader's willingness to suspend disbelief. This is dangerous, and prone to failure, but that's part of what makes it fun.
The great thing about writing is that...you can do all these antisocial things and you get paid for them and nobody ever arrests you because they're all make-believe. Then that way if you were actually ever driven to do any of those things, the pressure's off because you'd have already written them down. It's therapy.
To philosophize is only another way of being afraid and leads hardly anywhere but to cowardly make-believe.
Everything is just make believe. They're just different versions of make believe. I love the period of this movie [The Finest Hours]. I love the '40s. I love the '50s. I love the style of the clothes. I love how the women looked. I love the dances. I love the music. I love the amber of the lights and the cars. I'm in love with all of it.
Adults trying to protect children from reality, right? And adults always trying to fill children with fantasy - the tooth fairy, Santa, make-believe games, etc. But kids are really smart, I think they know from an early age about death, this void and hole they are immediately traveling toward.
There is no make-believe about heaven, future bliss, and compensation, to alleviate the bitter majesty, but only utter darkness, the void of unfulfillment, to receive and eat back the lives that have been tossed forth from the womb only to fail.
I was the youngest child and really spoiled. I loved to play make-believe. I loved pretending to be all kinds of different people and it just seemed natural that I would go into acting.
I tended to listen to doo-wop, but my grandmother would always have the radio on all day and she'd start with Yiddish and then move on to gospel and later to "make believe" ballroom music. I got to hear all kinds of music and my mother would get up to go to work listening to country music. That was her alarm clock. My dad was a jazz lover and listened to the man who wrote "Misty", Errol Garner. He loved piano players, so I got to listen to that as well.
It is a skill we learn early, the art of inventing stories to explain away the fearful scared strangeness of the world. Storytelling and make-believe, like war and agriculture, are among the arts of self-defense, and all of them are ways of enclosing otherness and claiming ownership.
Man has always sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort and advantage. He lives not by truth but by make-believe.
It's funny how when you're little, you miss all the little lies. They float right past you, but you don't wonder about them much. For a long time, you think this is just something adults still do after being kids - pretend.
As you get older and you hopefully battle your own demons, you find other reasons why you want to be an actor. The people that I truly admire do this because they love telling stories and they love the make-believe of the moment and not so much the gratification afterwards.
None of us wants to admit that we hate someone... When we deny our hate we detour around the crisis of forgiveness. We suppress our spite, make adjustments, and make believe we are too good to be hateful. But the truth is that we do not dare to risk admitting the hate we feel because we do not dare to risk forgiving the person we hate.
Man is a make-believe animal: he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part.
With Epcot Center, the Disney corporation has accomplished something I didn't think possible in today's world. They have created a land of make-believe that's worse than regular life.
To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.
If we must play the theological game, let us never forget that it is a game. Religion, it seems to me, can survive only as a consciously accepted system of make-believe.