Top 100 Quotes About Realism
#1. You try to make characters you care about, and I think realism helps. Even though this is a high concept, the characters have got to be real.
Ricky Gervais
#2. You achieve the surreal jokes through the realism by making it elastic.
Dylan Moran
#3. As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
Seamus Heaney
#4. Poetry is always dependent on realism, that you have to be a realist or you can't be a poet. Mrs.
Flannery O'Connor
#5. Hawthorne has given us a tradition that some people refer to as Yankee Magic Realism, and I do think there is a certain quality to the landscape that definitely leads into the dark woods.
Alice Hoffman
#6. Realism: the wealth of detail guarantees the truth of the tale.
Mason Cooley
#7. The "compleat diplomat" of the future should remain cognizant of realism's emphasis on the inescapable role of power, keep liberalism's awareness of domestic forces in mind, and occasionally reflect on constructivism's vision of change.
Stephen M. Walt
#8. The geniuses who conduct the motion-picture business killed glamour when they decided that what the public wanted was not dream stuff, from which movies used to be made, but realism.
Hedda Hopper
#9. Experimental work provides the strongest evidence for scientific realism. This is not because we test hypotheses about entities. It is because entities that in principle cannot be 'observed' are manipulated to produce a new phenomena
[sic] and to investigate other aspects of nature.
Ian Hacking
#11. I'm a big fan of Italian neo-realism and all of that stuff.
David Ayer
#12. Realism falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.
Eugene Ionesco
#13. Only the early Fitzgerald was great. Then came an orgy of brutal realism
Federico Fellini
#15. For me, "Zoo" has always been a fable. It has nothing to do with realism. It's a fable about what man is doing to the world, and the animals have retribution. But in the real world, this would not happen. But in the world of 1984, this kind of thing can happen in a story.
James Patterson
#16. Realism isn't something most people associate with the fantasy genre, yet it's an essential element of great fantasy writing.
Lynn Flewelling
#17. What is noble, lyrical, tender in the upper level shown is also with the servants, scoundrels, and scamps, as in a distorting mirror. This contrast seems to me a most appealing musical theme
to show love in its noble and crude forms, romanticism and crass realism mixed as in everyday life.
Stefan Zweig
#18. This strange business of what it is to be a writer is this increasingly insane world in which we live, in which surrealism, it seems, is the new realism.
Salman Rushdie
#20. When James Cameron brought me the script, which I developed with both Cameron and Jay Cocks, I wanted to make it a thriller, an action film, but with a conscience, and I found that it had elements of social realism.
Kathryn Bigelow
#21. The good thing about writing a true story is that you don't have to worry about giving an impression of realism.
Laurent Binet
#22. He's like everybody else in television. And Hollywood. And Broadway. He thinks everything sentimental is tender, everything brutal is a slice of realism and that everything that runs into physical violence is a legitimate climax to something that isn't even-
J.D. Salinger
#23. All dramatic realism is somewhat sadistic; an audience is persuaded to watch something that makes it uncomfortable and from which no relief is offered - no laughter, no tears, no purgation.
Mary McCarthy
#24. There is a reality to the way the actors play the scenes, given that there is a real, animatronic, moving robot in the room. So the level of nuance and realism in performance was higher because we built the real ones, and it keeps the visual effects guys honest.
Shawn Anthony Levy
#25. Realism's anxieties are not my anxieties, but I think I've had its tools close at hand all along. It may be that I'm reaching for them more often than I used to. On the other hand, I'm making no promises for the future. The material itself always gets the last word.
Roy Kesey
#26. The situation of the Old Left was the theory of Socialist Realism, etc. It seemed pointless to argue. We stayed carefully away from people who wrote for the New Masses.
George Oppen
#27. In all my books, I try to have a strong element of realism underlying the fantastic.
Garth Nix
#28. ... depressive realism. Depression is not the near death experience described by so many, [Kayla Dunn] suggests, but a rebirth in which the new psyche has removed self-delusion. Compared with so-called healthy individuals, depressives are more realistic in their worldview.
Jan Wong
#29. I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don't tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth. And it that's sinful, then let me be damned for it!
Tennessee Williams
#30. Realism in foreign policy means careful consideration of all aspects pertinent to the issue, before taking a decision. This is the only way you can move from where you are to someplace else.
Henry A. Kissinger
#31. As we applaud the hard-edged realism of the opening battle scene of Saving Private Ryan, we cringe at the thought of seeing the same on the nightly news.We are told it would be pornographic.
Tim Robbins
#32. Realism ... has no more to do with reality than anything else.
Hob Broun
#33. Capitalism will behave antisocially if it is profitable for it to do so, and that can now mean human devastation on an unimaginable scale. What used to be apocalyptic fantasy is today no more than sober realism ...
Terry Eagleton
#34. Now that economic realism has finally arrived in India, the future lies in becoming a strong economic power. Dominance in the world will come only from how well a nation can cope with economic realism and towards that India must work, must find its own place under the sun.
Mukesh Ambani
#35. It may be that just as tonality recurs in music and realism in painting, so the idea of liberalism recurs in politics-though each time in a different vein.
Eva Hoffman
#36. What she needs, at least one thing she needs, is companionship. After all why should she eat? Who needs her to be alive? What we call psychosis is sometimes simply realism. But human beings can't live on realism alone.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#37. Realism' has been abandoned in the search for reality: the 'principal objective' of abstract art is precisely this reality.
Ben Nicholson
#38. My mother learned that she was carrying me at about the same time the Second World War was declared; with the family talent for magic realism, she once told me she had been to the doctor's on the very day.
Angela Carter
#39. You cannot prove realism to a complete sceptic or idealist; but you can show an honest man that he is not a complete sceptic or idealist, but a realist at heart. So long as he is alive his sincere philosophy must fulfil the assumptions of his life and not destroy him.
George Santayana
#40. I've done a Russian movie," Claire said. "Thank God they're still stuck in realism, Zola-crazy. Subtitling their films is like captioning a child's picture book.
Paula Fox
#41. I hate that which we have decided to call realism, even though I have been made one of its high priests.
Gustave Flaubert
#42. ...political realism is the way forward for any system that is genuinely for humanity or for the interest and advancement of the people of this world.
Janvier Chouteu-Chando
#44. True realism lies in the search for the expression of forms faithful to their content. But there is no content detached from human interest.
Asger Jorn
#45. I was under the influence of the early modern masters, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck and Hemingway, especially, when I was a kid. I reacted against writers like Barth and John Hawkes. I did not care for the post-modernist stuff; my allegiance was to realism.
Robert Stone
#46. I wish to confound all these people, to create a work of art of a supernatural realism and of a spiritualist naturalism. I wish to prove ... that nothing is explained in the mysteries which surround us.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
#47. And the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing. For to miss the joy is to miss all.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#48. A thing that many young fellows don't seem to realism at first is that success depends on oneself and not on a kindly fate, nor on the interest of powerful friends.
Robert Baden-Powell
#49. Realism is simply Romanticism that has lost its reason ... that is its reason for existing.
G.K. Chesterton
#50. I always considered Ray Harryhausen's work so fine that it was way out of my league: in terms of realism and naturalism, in terms of animal movement.
Nick Park
#51. Our most serious failure today is the inability to provide effective practical guidance as to how to live the life of Jesus. And I believe that is due to this very real loss of biblical realism for our lives
Dallas Willard
#52. Don't get me wrong, hard and soft fantasy stories can both be good. But you need to know which camp you're in. I'm into realism. I'm a hard fantasy guy.
Patrick Rothfuss
#53. We are hopeful that the North Koreans can show a little bit more realism, a little bit more flexibility.
Mitchell Reiss
#54. Realism is to fiction what gravity is to walking: a confinement that allows dancing under the right circumstances.
George Saunders
#55. There is an exuberance in good fantasy quite unlike the most exalted moments of realistic fiction. Both forms have similar goals; but realism walks where fantasy dances.
Lloyd Alexander
#56. Realism is a bad word. In a sense everything is realistic. I see no line between the imaginary and the real.
Federico Fellini
#57. I would never write realistic prose. I don't like people who try to write in a poetic style, but in the course of their book abandon it for realism, and weave back and forth like drunkards between the surreal and the real.
Marguerite Young
#58. The form of the Gothic novel also implicitly contested the claims of Realism to reflect the world directly by showing how artificial its structure was.
Michael Richardson
#59. True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing.
Jean Cocteau
#60. Abstraction has always been around, since the drawings in the caves. It exists in all cultures all over the world. I thought for a while that it was going to be the major movement. But people always drift back to realism. I guess there is a certain security in that.
Brice Marden
#61. What I dislike is conventional realism - a system of gestures, descriptions, psychological revelations that was once a vital way of representing the world but has become hackneyed through endless repetition. I'd argue that a conventional realist isn't a realist at all, but a falsifier of the real.
Steven Millhauser
#62. Has he some psychological antipathy to realism? I am no psychologist, and cannot say. The fact remains that Euwe commits the most inexplicable mistakes in thoroughly favorable positions, and that this weakness has consistently tarnished his record.
Hans Kmoch
#63. Theories should be judged by their ability to predict events rather than by the realism of their assumptions.
Milton Friedman
#65. He thinks everything sentimental is tender, everything brutal is a slice of realism ...
J.D. Salinger
#66. Realism hasn't fallen out of favor with most people, who are interested in people's lives rather than gymnastics of style or literary trends. It's a certain kind of academic who undervalues realism, largely because it is not amenable to endless exegesis.
Vikram Seth
#67. Realism in so far as it means Reality to life is always bad art.
Sherwood Anderson
#68. I tend to prioritize emotional realism above the known laws of time and space, and when you do that, it's inevitable that strange things happen. Which can be quite enjoyable, I think.
Helen Oyeyemi
#69. I was a big fan of John Cassavetes, his wife, Gena Rowlands, and that era of filmmaking which was about realism and which represented the antithesis of the dreamy escapism you found in musicals.
Carmen Ejogo
#71. The Symbol of all Art is the Prism. The goal is destructive. To break up the white light of objective realism into the secret glories it contains.
E. E. Cummings
#72. You have to have a certain realism that government is a pretty blunt instrument, and without the constant attention of highly qualified people with the right metrics, it will fall into not doing things very well.
Bill Gates
#73. All things in my novels are real for me. Some western critics said that Garcia Marquez's novels are magic realism. However, I believe that Marquez must have experienced everything in his novels.
Haruki Murakami
#74. Realism is death to me. I cannot stand life as it is.
Zane Grey
#75. I adore the elegance of botanical realism but I also can't help but dream of my very own neo-surrealistic fantasy flowers, and so I paint and illustrate both; I always find myself between both of those worlds.
Minnelli Lucy France
#77. What passes for political realism may make for lively academic debates. But it often functions, ironically, as a tool of social control, rendering us passive with an analysis that overwhelms and paralyzes us.
Parker Palmer
#78. He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into nonobjective painting.
Jackson Pollock
#79. Kafka's inevitable tropism for the allegorical puts him in marked opposition to the realism that dominated the literary world of the first half of the 20th century.
John Kessel
#80. But with The Dark Crystal, instead of puppetry we're trying to go toward a sense of realism - toward a reality of creatures that are actually alive and we're mixing up puppetry and all kinds of other techniques.
Jim Henson
#81. A lot of television shows, when you see births, the baby is coming out, and the wife is freaking, 'You did this to me!' but she is still super beautiful. There's none of the realism that we just went through.
Lennon Parham
#82. I think that the way of bringing realism into fantasy is to treat it as the commonplace.
Grant Bowler
#84. TV is sometimes accused of encouraging fantasies. Its real problem, though, is that it encourages-enforces, almost-a brute realism. It is anti-Utopian in the extreme. We're discouraged from thinking that, except for a few new products, there might be a better way of doing things.
Bill McKibben
#85. There's nothing that will bring realism into your world as quickly as realizing that you're out of cash.
David Heinemeier Hansson
#86. Painting is the representation of visible forms. The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal.
Gustave Courbet
#88. 'Up the Junction' went on to inform my love of British social realism. It was the first film I saw of this ilk, a very stark, visceral reflection of England, an England I didn't necessarily feel a part of but that I knew was out there. You could almost smell the bread and butter and cabbage.
Gurinder Chadha
#89. We're capable of understanding that someone has to drop an atomic bomb on a town of innocent civilians, but not that others have to cut up prostitutes who spread disease and moral depravity in the slums of London. Hence we call the former realism and the latter madness.
Jo Nesbo
#90. Realism that is limited to the end of one's nose is more dangerous than the most insane fantasticality, because it's blind.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#91. All seemingly profound thinking which passes for realism, because it conveniently does away with all troublesome principles, has agreat attraction for the adolescent mind.
Johan Huizinga
#92. Realism...is a kind of disappointed tribute to the ideal.
Roger Scruton
#93. Cynical realism - it's the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation
Aldous Huxley
#94. Only if you follow the realism of science rather than the Hollywood fantasy of romance, will you achieve True Love
Fred Nour
#95. It's a reality of art that the fewer lines you get, the harder it is. Cartooning is actually harder than realism. You have less to work with. It's like trying to build a house-if you have unlimited resources, you're in much better shape than if you get two bricks, a hammer, and a bent nail.
Ursula Vernon
#96. Delicious ... Everything I'd hoped for in a new Wild Cards book. The character interactions and plot twists have exactly the complexity, surprise, and unsentimental realism I'd expect out of a George R. R. Martin project.
Austin Grossman
#97. Best movie ever?! Come on, my appearance on Arrested Development had more dynamics, realism and feel to it than the whole trilogy combined.
Zach Braff
#98. Our generation has an incredible amount of realism, yet at the same time it loves to complain and not really change. Because, if it does change, then it won't have anything to complain about.
Tori Amos
#99. Although the Academy prefers their Best Pictures grounded in realism, not fantasy, Lee's 'Life of Pi' win proved that the voters understand and appreciate the qualities a visionary director needs to create an otherworldly adventure.
Richard Corliss
#100. I often told the fanatics of realism that there is no such thing as realism in art: it only exists in the mind of the observer. Art is a symbol, a thing conjuring up reality in our mental image. That is why I don't see any contradiction between abstract and figurative art either.
Antoni Tapies
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