Quotes About Artifice

The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form.

How can a motion picture reflect real life when it is made by people who are living artificial lives?

To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.

Everyone now, not just writers, creates a written, published persona on a daily (hourly) basis. Artifice abounds.

Maybe illusion and artifice—lies, even—are a necessary part of romance.

She understood. They were plastic flowers of words—but they looked nice on the surface.

The room rang full of her artificial laughter.

I am still obsessed with creating a false world, and will be until I die.

When I put away my artifices and lovingly arrange in a corner all my toys, words, images and phrases, so dear to me I feel like kissing them, then I become so small and innocuous, so alone in a room so large and sad, so profoundly sad!

No nos gustan los espectáculos. Despreciamos a actores y danzarines. Todo espectáculo es la imitación degradada de lo que habría solamente que soñar.

I don't have stylistic loyalty. That's why people perceive me changing all the time. But there is a real continuity in my subject matter. As an artist of artifice, I do believe I have more integrity than any one of my contemporaries.

If you're going to pretend to be somebody you're not - which is the whole point of being a rock star - then why not just invent fake characters and have them do it all for you?

In the end, it's acting, it's not real. But every director will tell you that you have to create conditions that create tension, because tension is what makes drama feel real.

Well, I think in trying to make life seem real enough that one is moved to do something about the more atrocious things. By going really far afield into a completely fake world, maybe there's a chance to make things resonant somehow - or in this case, truly terrifying. To make it as bad as the real stuff that's happening.

His eyes look as if he's pawned his real ones and is wearing paste.

Isn't it better to triumph by the strength of your muscles than by the artifice of a derailleur?

Stripping away artifice - it's the constant standard I aim for in acting, to approximate life. People talk about being bigger than life - but there's nothing bigger than life.

That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact.

You can tell within a sentence if something is fiction or non-fiction. You can tell in the artifice of the language or the care of the construction the difference between art and life.

Es impresionante la fuerza que ejerce en nosotros la sugestión. Basta que una se se proponga ser lo más natural posible para que cada ademán y cada movimiento se carguen de artificios.

I'm sure it was real but it resembled one of those cheap wigs worn by department-store mannequins, jet black and as glossy as nylon. It didn't seem to belong to her head.

If we bestow but a very little attention to the economy of the animal creation, we shall find manifest examples of premeditation, perseverance, resolution, and consumate artifice, in order to effect their purpose.

I feel like my job as a storyteller and director is to create an experience where the audience forgets they're in a cinema and can get lost in the story. Things popping out of the screen call attention to the artifice of what you're doing, so I use 3D as more of a window into a world behind the screen.

In the theater, while you recognized that you were looking at a house, it was a house in quotation marks. On screen, the quotation marks tend to be blotted out by the camera.