Quotes About Realism

We live in a real world. Come back to it.

I hate nothing more than sugary photographs with tricks, poses and effects. So allow me to be honest ?and tell the truth about our age and its people.

A pessimist is a man who tells the truth prematurely.

My thesis in terms of all my art is finding the beauty in the ugly truth. Just find the beauty in realism and what's there.

You treat violence as an aberration ... when in truth it is the norm. It is the very essence of the human condition.

A thriller becomes great when it carries a feeling of reality and truth.

It is not realistic, maybe ... but art doesn't have to be realistic. Romeo and Juliet is not realistic, but it is true... it shows the essence of falling in love.

Novels must have verisimilitude, and truth has little enough of that.

Realism: the wealth of detail guarantees the truth of the tale.

The point is not to give people a break. The point is to tell all the truth you can bear about them and not despise them, not to be a kumbaya kind of guy.

I felt sympathy for her but not too much. Idealism dies hard with everybody.

The world was not how you wanted it to be. The world was how it was.

The romantic view of the natural world as a blissful Eden is only held by people who have no actual experience of nature. People who live in nature are not romantic about it at all. They may hold spiritual beliefs about the world around them, they may have a sense of the unity of nature or the aliveness of all things, but they still kill the animals and uproot the plants in order to eat, to live. If they don't, they will die.

Farid, you are keeping a hawk; don't expect her to lay eggs like a chicken.

From On Combat (2004) Do not expect the combat fairy to come bonk you with the combat wand and suddenly make you capable of doing things that you never rehearsed before. It will not happen.

For realists, war is like surgery-a painful and dangerous activity that is sometimes necessary ... A pacifist is like a Christian Scientist who is against surgery even when the alternative is the crippling or death of the patient.

I sing to the realists; people who accept it like it is.

Let's face it, I ain't ever gonna be the best singer in the world, or the best anything.

When you're writing about people that are not very well off, you seem to see the kitchen sink. So it was a bit of a sort of cosy phrase that got used a bit too much.

Like academic Marxists, who are their sisters under the skin, libertarians are far more interested in an ideal world than in the one where ordinary humans live.

Through their play Barbara imagined their lives as adults. They used the dolls to reflect the adult world around them. They would sit and carry on conversations, making the dolls real people.

Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.

I try to watch only real things, which basically amounts to C-Span for me. I like real people in real situations. I learn from that.

When I write an original story I write about people I know first-hand and situations I'm familiar with. I don't write stories about the nineteenth century.