Quotes About Realism

Have you seen these Japanese hospital droids, or humanoids, or whatever they call it? They've perfected the skin, and the skin looks so real. They have these motors between the eyes for when they smile. It's just mind-blowing.

It may sound kind of brash but you really do have to treat it like just another job. It could be over tomorrow, and if you invest too much of yourself in, 'Hey I am the show and the show is me,' you'll get snapped hard.

I really admire paintings that look like an actual snapshot - I think that's just extraordinary.

In 'Red Dead Redemption' they have a thing where if you walk through snow your footsteps stay where you've gone. I think that's just representative of humanity.

The fantastic is in complicity with the realist model, in the claims that realism makes to represent the true face of reality. It points to the gaps and inadequacies of realism, but does not question the legitimacy of its claims to represent reality. The concept of "suspension of disbelief', that beloved criterion of positivist criticism supposedly serving to establish the legitimacy of the fantastic, confirms this hegemony.

Kings and philosophers defecate, and so do ladies.

THE UNCANNY VALLEY

I knew better than to clutch at straws purely so that I could flog dead horses with them.

This is not a romance — I have too often faced the music of life to the tune of hardship to waste time in snivelling and gushing over fancies and dreams [author's introduction]

Love has no place for idealization.

I love documentaries, I like observing real people.

No, Mary had no illusions about romance. Falling in love was a pretty name for it, that was all.

Perfect people make for boring novels.

If realistic fiction is primarily metonymic, fantasy is inescapably metaphoric; because the presence of the impossible blocks a literal reading, we are invited to look at Fred and his world as some sort of iconic stand-in for everyday life, rather than as an extension from it. By

We achieve some measure of adulthood when we recognize our parents as they really were, without sentimentalizing or mythologyzing, but also without blaming them unfairly for our imperfections.

Sometimes you have to settle for doing what you can as opposed to what you think you should.

What I admire about Austen (among hundreds of other commendable qualities) is her traditional rather than modern conception of morality. She sees it, as did Aristotle, Aquinas, and Marx, as a matter of public conduct, not as the inner light, interior emotions, what you happen to be feeling, what you find aesthetically alluring, and the like. She's an extremely tough-minded ethical realist in an increasingly corrupt, sentimentalist culture.

Om began to feel the acute depression that steals over every realist in the presence of an optimist.

Listen, happy endings is fine if they turn out happy," said Granny, glaring at the sky. "But you can't make 'em for other people. Like the only way you could make a happy marriage is by cuttin' their heads off as soon as they say 'I do', yes? You can't make happiness…" Granny Weatherwax stared at the distant city. "All you can do," she said, "is make an ending.

Captain Vimes believed in logic, in much the same way as a man in a desert believes in ice – i.e., it was something he really needed, but this just wasn't the place for it.

Robbie Brace, a practical man, had chosen a practical field. Oh, but how it depressed him.

MARY: Catherine! Is it necessary to include such a detail? CATHERINE: Do you expect our readers to believe that we had no bodily needs or functions for entire days at a time? MARY: No, but such things are simply—unstated. They go without saying. CATHERINE: It's very fashionable now to include realistic details, no matter how unpleasant or improper. Look at the French writers. Look at Émile Zola. MARY: We are not French.

The loss of the religious understanding of the human condition—that Man is a fallen creature for whom virtue is necessary but never fully attainable—is a loss, not a gain, in true sophistication. The secular substitute—the belief in the perfection of life on earth by the endless extension of a choice of pleasures—is not merely callow by comparison but much less realistic in its understanding of human nature.

I feel I'm functioning at some level as a journalist because even though I write fiction, I'm trying to get the world accurate.