Realism is a bad word. In a sense everything is realistic. I see no line between the imaginary and the real. — Federico Fellini
Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures. — Jessamyn West
The problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. That's not true with non-fiction. — Tom Wolfe
Reality leaves a lot to the imagination. — John Lennon
Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything. — Ivana Trump
Fact is often stranger than fiction because most writers of fiction try to make their stories plausible. — Richard Posner
REALISM, n. The art of depicting nature as it is seem by toads. The charm suffusing a landscape painted by a mole, or a story written by a measuring-worm. — Ambrose Bierce
Fiction helps me to reconnect with the true, deep weirdness inherent in everyday reality, in our dealings with one another, in just being alive. — Karen Russell
Some of the poetic writers who insert passages of realism in their texts have no underlying philosophy to uphold them, and revert to realism. — Marguerite Young
The best stories are often true...The narrative of human life is most beautiful when told truthfully and without boundaries. — Shonda Rhimes
Fiction is the truth inside the lie. — Stephen King
The child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are unreal, they are not untrue. — Bruno Bettelheim
Realistic Quotes
Realistic expectations for life are that we are going to be better today than we were yesterday, be better tomorrow than we were today. That's a plan for success. So [the key is] simple: just work. — Jim Harbaugh
Be realistic, demand the impossible! — Che Guevara
A positive self image and healthy self esteem is based on approval, acceptance and recognition from others; but also upon actual accomplishments, achievements and success upon the realistic self confidence which ensues. — Abraham Maslow
The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjust the sails.
The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails. — William Arthur Ward
Don't get older; get better: Live realistically. Give generously. Adapt willingly. Trust fearlessly. Rejoice daily. — Charles R. Swindoll
Any realistic vision of change must be based on the notion of empowerment of people. — Michael Manley
There is a tremendous relief in knowing that {God's} love to me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery now can disillusion Him about me, in the way I am so often disillusioned about myself, and quench His determination to bless me. — J. I. Packer
If you can imagine a thing, conjure it up in space then you can make it... The universe is real but you can't see it. You have to imagine it. Then you can be realistic about reproducing it. — Alexander Calder
The problem was to sustain at any cost the feeling you had in the theater that you were watching a real person, yes, but an intense condensation of his experience, not simply a realistic series of episodes. — Arthur Miller
Being Realistic Quotes
In a perfect world, you would be able to hold onto everyone. But It's not realistic. The changes with NYPD have been progressive and have taken the show to new levels. — Dennis Franz
The goal you set must be challenging. At the same time, it should be realistic and attainable, not impossible to reach. It should be challenging enough to make you stretch, but not so far that you break. — Rick Hansen
Rely on the ordinary virtues that intelligent, balanced human beings have relied on for centuries: common sense, thrift, realistic expectations, patience, and perseverance. — John C. Bogle
I think happiness is overrated. Satisfied, at peace-those would be more realistic goals. — Brad Pitt
If people stopped looking on their emotions as ethereal, almost inhuman processes, and realistically viewed them as being largely composed of perceptions, thoughts, evaluations, and internalized sentences, they would find it quite possible to work calmly and concertedly at changing them. — Albert Ellis
Be realistic Plan for a miracle.
Rhetoric is rooted in an essential function of language itself, a function that is wholly realistic and continually born anew: the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols. — Kenneth Burke
I believe that history is not made by cynics. It is made by realists who are not afraid to dream. Let us be these people. — Tzipi Livni
Being in control of your life and having realistic expectations about your day-to-day challenges are the keys to stress management, which is perhaps the most important ingredient to living a happy, healthy and rewarding life. — Marilu Henner
The experience of helping a fellow man in danger, or even of training in a realistic manner to be ready to give this help, tends to change the balance of power in a youth's inner life with the result that compassion can become the master motive. — Kurt Hahn
It's what we live for, to be able to make great illusions. The thing about 'Entourage' is everything we do is realistic. We go to the real places, we shoot on location. We get the real people. It's a perfect marriage between fact and fiction. — Adrian Grenier
To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention. — Ursula K. Le Guin
I'm an unashamed realist, and actually, I try to make whatever the script is the reality of that situation, even though it's fictional. — Wolfgang Petersen
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective. — Raymond Chandler
It's a funny thing with documentary films - you want them to feel as entertaining and as gripping as a fictional film. With a fictional film you want it to feel as realistic as a documentary film. — Jonathan Demme
In the meantime, I just have to create those realistic goals about the fact that I don't have a ton of options as an actor who's been on a science fiction show for 8 years. — Michael Shanks
I'm not interested in a realistic look - not at all, not ever. Every film should look the way I feel.
I think human beings exist in a social world. I write realistic fiction, and so it isn't that surprising that the social realities of their existence would be part of the story. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
In fiction, I tend to write fairly realistic dialogue-not always, and it tends to vary
from book to book. But in many books, there is a colloquialism of address. The characters will speak in a quite idiosyncratic way sometimes. — Don Delillo
A handy short definition of almost all science fiction might read: realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method. — Robert A. Heinlein
For me, any fiction of nobles and swords necessarily has to be a story of corruption, injustice and savagely violent conflict - because any other treatment is going to have all the heft and realistic honesty of a bedtime fairy tale for five year olds. — Richard K. Morgan
I think what's happening is, it's all - fantasy, science fiction, ghosts, trolls, whatever - finally being called, being admitted to be literature. The way it used to be, before the Realists and the bloody Modernists took over. — Ursula K. Le Guin
Any documentary; any capturing of a non-fiction event, is a hyper-realistic condensation of reality that hopefully reveals an emotional truth. It's never the actual literal truth of an event. — Joe Berlinger
Because I write realistic fiction, I generally don't think about fixing anyone - I just think about how I want to feel at the end of the book - And I try to write toward that feeling. — Jacqueline Woodson
I read the paper every day. There are certain subjects that will catch my attention. I have an entire file of articles. Of course I make up the story, especially since most criminals are not very smart and fictional crime must be clever. I have to make sure the story I am telling is interesting and realistic. In this book I went on line and found out the manners of codes. I thought it interesting to use them as a jumping off point. — Sue Grafton
It's once I discover the people inside that the story really gets going, and then the formal invention becomes less important. It's just the way in; it's the door; and then what's behind it is always some kind of people, which I think probably makes me more in the tradition of realistic fiction because that's usually what I'm interested in, the people. — Jess Walter
By and large, serious fiction was the work of victims who portrayed victims for an audience of victims who, it was oddly assumed, would want to see their lives realistically portrayed. — Gore Vidal
Fiction doesn't appeal to me because it can describe physical appearances exhaustively or because it can offer access to the inner depths of an array of human characters - neither that kind of "realism" of bodily surfaces nor of individual psychologies seems particularly realistic to me. — Ben Lerner
I read fiction all the time. It's true that I don't like fantasy or science fiction. I like "realistic" novels, particularly those in which nothing much ever happens. — Gustavo Perez Firmat
To be perfectly frank: I don't write women's fiction. I write intimate, gritty, realistic, character-driven fiction that happens to be thrown into the women's fiction category. — Jillian Medoff
In France, it's always about life, normal life. We always stick with these realistic things. So when French people are dreaming about American movies, they go and see the thrillers, and Westerns, and science fiction, huge entertaining movies. — Berenice Bejo
I base the roles I choose depending on the characters. That's just how I'm gonna run my career. So if it's a good role I'm gonna take it whether it be fantasy, or whether it be realistic or fiction, anything. — Josh Hutcherson
When I was starting out, science fiction was a little genre over there, which only a few people read. But now -- where are you going to put, for example, Salman Rushdie? Or any of the South American writers? Most people get by calling them magical realists. — Doris Lessing
Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs of a dysfunctional society, denying the use of imagination, was the ghetto. — Ursula K. Le Guin
There are very real differences between science fiction and realistic fiction, between horror and fantasy, between romance and mystery. Differences in writing them, in reading them, in criticizing them. Vive les différences! They're what gives each genre its singular flavor and savor, its particular interest for the reader - and the writer. — Ursula K. Le Guin
There's an overlap between social-realist fiction and crime fiction - a sweet spot there. — Daniel Woodrell
I would say that most of my books are contemporary realistic fiction... a couple, maybe three, fall into the 'historic fiction' category. Science fiction is not a favorite genre of mine, though I have greatly enjoyed some of the work of Ursula LeGuin. I haven't read much science fiction so I don't know other sci-fi authors. — Lois Lowry
I enjoy receiving and giving realistic fiction, for both children and adults, with strong characters, beautiful language, and humane visions. — Sharon Creech
I have for a long time loved fabulist, imaginative fiction, such as the writing of Italo Calvino, Jose Saramago, Michael Bulgakov, and Salman Rushdie. I also like the magic realist writers, such as Borges and Marquez, and feel that interesting truths can be learned about our world by exploring highly distorted worlds. — Alan Lightman
The mainstream has lost its way. Crime fiction is an objective, realistic genre because it's about the real world, real bodies really being killed by somebody. And this involves the investigator in trying to understand the society that the person lived in. — Michael Dibdin
Fantasy is not antirational, but pararational; not realistic but surrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud's terminology, it employs primary not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes which, as Jung warned us, are dangerous things. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe. — Ursula K. Le Guin
In Conclusion
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