Quotes About Realism

MEANWHILE, BACK IN REALITY…

to Madame Tussauds wax museum.

Unfortunately, I've seen violence, and I think, in films, it is the dramatic extremity of it.

I like the realism of anti-heroes. It's a healthy thing. I think heroes can be very unhealthy at times because it doesn't connect you to reality.

I work very hard at creating complex characters, a mix of positives and negatives. They are all flawed. I believe flaws are almost universal, and they help us understand, sympathise and, paradoxically, feel closer to such characters.

People aren't universally heroic.

Anyone who wants simple, pat stories should buy another author's product. The real universe ain't that way, and neither are my fictive ones.

One thing that annoys me is when you see women in these terrible and incredible situations with perfectly glossed lips. You're not going to look good in the apocalypse.

Growing up, I looked up to real women. I didn't go in for hero worship and I still don't. Everybody has feet of clay.

A perfect marriage is as rare as a perfect love. Could it be otherwise, when both men and women are so imperfect? Could aught else be expected? Yet all do expect it.

John Currin's exaggerated realism and his twisted women kept me off balance, never knowing if they were sincere or ironic or some new emotion.

Some romantic you are," Caine complained as he pushed the door open with his back."Whatever happened to women who liked to be swept off their feet?" "They got dropped," Diana said flatly.

We've got lots of time. We're not winning the Stanley Cup in the first exhibition game.

'E.T.' and 'Star Wars' were cult movies then and opened up a brand new world of adventure and mystery. But as much as I would have loved to be friends with E.T., I realized that following in the footsteps of Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan was more realistic.

In real life, people fumble their words. They repeat themselves and stare blankly off into space and don't listen properly to what other people are saying. I find that kind of speech fascinating but screenwriters never write dialogue like that because it doesn't look good on the page.

I've always had an unsentimental view. I don't think the BBC is my auntie. I worked there for years, and you learn that they don't love you for yourself. They'll use you as long as you're popular. You shouldn't wait until it starts to wane. It can sometimes end badly.

I've always had a problem with conventional punctuation of dialogue because it does seem to me to set it off too much from the narrative. I mean, in life, things don't stop while somebody says something, and then stuff starts up again; it's all happening at once.

Working on a startup is a balancing act: being crazy enough to believe your idea can take off but not crazy enough to miss the signs when it's clearly not going to.

I don't try to sugarcoat things, but I also think my books make positive statements about the people and values in small-town America.

I knew the statistics of playing pro football were 1% of 1%, so I just never planned on it.

More eccentric characters can push pretty far, but if you stay on the side of reality, it's always funnier.

I was staying at the Konchucos Tambo lodge, next to the Huascaran national park, near Chavin. Sitting here on its veranda, I was beginning to see where all those Latin American magical realists get their inspiration from: they don't need to make anything up; they just write down what's around them.

The true picture of life as it is, if it could be adequately painted, would show men what they are, and how they might rise, not, indeed to perfection, but one step first, and then another on the ladder.

The world's failure to live up to the impossible promises of the positive-thinking credo did not convince these men of the credo's impracticality, but rather that the world was in a sad state of decline, that it had forsaken the true and correct path.2