Quotes About Realism

That's the thing with sci-fi and action roles. You have to play the danger as real. If you don't, you end up with egg on your face. You have to commit. You can't think about how stupid it might look without the special effects.

I never think about my style but just try and make the pictures look believable.

I definitely don't think of myself as someone identified by region. It's too far-flung a region, for starters, and southern New Mexico is very isolated. I wouldn't think of my identity as generational, either, but maybe as more stylistic, in the school of realism and domestic issues.

We talk about characters in literature as though they were built on the model of the real person, but then I often think that the way we present ourselves as real people is based heavily on the way literary psychologies are stylized, and I wonder how the two forms of realistic personhood feed on or fulfill each other.

The acting of the '50s is really stylized, so you're not really getting a lot of authentic, everyday characterization of people.

I didn't want 'Mudbound' to feel stylized in any way.

For an Impressionist to paint from nature is not to paint the subject, but to realize sensations.

I write songs about real things... The subject dictates the mood and it goes from there, really.

We sometimes forget that human invention can also be a subject of human invention: that might seem a modern notion, or a postmodern one, but novelists have taken time - sometimes time out from their realist fixations - to source and satirise the speech and power we rely on.

Realism is always subjective in film. There's no such thing as cinema verite.

'War and Peace' holds a strange place in literary history, participating in the crowning of realism as a substantial and serious literary mode in America, even as the novel also contributed to the argument that historical fiction could be by nature dangerous, illegitimate, and inaccurate.

What I don't believe is that DVDs or HD broadcasts can be a substitute for the real thing.

I get really excited when I see filmmakers make something that is subtle and feels real. It is really tough to do right.

In any story, drama may be intensified by the characters realizing by how narrow a margin they had managed to succeed - that is, where coincidence played a role. This is one of the more realistic ways to use coincidence because rarely do we realize how important a coincidental event is until after the fact.

Optimism with some experience behind it is much more energizing than plain old experience with a certain degree of cynicism.

I may sound very cynical, but a cynic is really a realist.

It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling...

I do not expect from someone what they will not or cannot give me.

I like living in the 20th century... to me the world has never been more beautiful. I am trying to paint the real world I live in, as beautifully as I can with my own eyes.

Keep your chin up. No one expected you to save the world, otherwise you would have been born wearing a cape and tights. Just do the best you can.

Well, I'm not a method actress by any stretch of the imagination so the best thing that I can do is be as real as possible and find whatever commonality in that character that I can see myself.

I wish you the best that can be hoped for, and no worse than can be expected.

I'm an Afro-realist. I take what comes, and I do my best to affect what is unacceptable in society.

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.