Believable Quotes & Sayings

When there's characters out there that don't have humor, I don't find them as believable, because we all have humor, no matter what level it is, we all use it every day, no matter what situation we're in, we'll try and have a bit of a laugh even if it goes wrong. — Rhys Darby

A writer can't just be well-educated or good at research; to build a living, breathing world with interesting characters, you have to write from the gut. I'm not saying you have to live your life like a fantasy adventure. The trick is the ability to synthesize your own everyday experiences into your fiction. Infuse your characters with believable emotions and motivations. Infuse your world with rich sensory detail. For that you have to be in touch with your own existence and your own soul, the dark and the light of it. — Lynn Flewelling

Freudian psychoanalytical theory is a mythology that answers pretty well to Levi-Strauss's descriptions. It brings some kind of order into incoherence; it, too, hangs together, makes sense, leaves no loose ends, and is never (but never) at a loss for explanation. In a state of bewilderment it may therefore bring comfort and relief ... give its subject a new and deeper understanding of his own condition and of the nature of his relationship to his fellow men. A mythical structure will be built up around him which makes sense and is believable-in, regardless of whether or not it is true. — Peter Medawar

When you are 'world building,' people will oftentimes judge how well you built your world. They want to know: Is the culture believable? Does it feel like it has a history? I try very hard to pay attention to details. — Marie Rutkoski

Sometimes the truth is not as believable as a well-crafted lie. — Linda Palmer

The Ideas aren't the hard bit. They're a small component of the whole. Creating believable people who do more or less what you tell them to is much harder.And hardest by far is the process of simply sitting down and putting one word after another to construct whatever it is you're trying to build: making it interesting, making it new. But — Neil Gaiman

Authors must spend months, years making fantasy believable in a single work while reality runs rampant and complete chaos elsewhere. — Don Roff

I always try to write about believable people. — Danielle Steel

The thing to me that's fun is trying to make the characters seem believable, or realistic. And it's especially challenging when you're doing fantasy stories, when you're doing superhero types of things. — Stan Lee

Good fiction makes the truth believable. — Tarrant Smith

I really, deeply believe in the primacy of character. I believe that my job as a writer is to put a believable human being on a page. — Ayana Mathis

Why all this insistence on the senses? Because in order to convince your reader that he is THERE, you must assault each of his senses, in turn, with color, sound, taste, and texture. If your reader feels the sun on his flesh, the wind fluttering his shirt sleeves, half your fight is won. The most improbable tales can be made believable, if your reader, through his senses, feels certain that he stands at the middle of events. He cannot refuse, then, to participate. The logic of events always gives way to the logic of the senses. — Ray Bradbury

Anybody can make something up and have it sound believable. The hard part is remembering all the lies you've told, and all the people you've told them to, and then living the lies that have become your life. — Paul Neilan

I have to make this love affair believable enough. It's very European. — Chita Rivera

This is the secret of good storytelling: to lie, but to keep the arithmetic sound. A storyteller, like any other sort of enthusiastic liar, is on an unpredictable adventure. His initial lie, his premise, will suggest many new lies of its own. The storyteller must choose among them, seeking those which are most believable, which keep the arithmetic sound. Thus does a story generate itself. — Kurt Vonnegut

Coming into World War II, we were seen as a conquering hero for beleaguered people, we are now seen as invader, an occupier. And what that is saying is we have more might than right, so we kind of have a kind of moral deficit disorder. And that's why a leader must lift us back to the higher ground, because at the end of the day what makes you strong is that you are believable, that as significant as might is, ultimately right is even stronger than might. — Jesse Jackson

And the most important thing - apart from telling a good, believable story, and being a true character - is to be someone the audience will care about, even if you're playing a murderer or rapist. — Anna Friel

It's more believable that a cop would get involved in solving these murders. I mean, you're talking about writing a series. How believable is it that this Hollywood gossip columnist is going to keep stumbling on all these murders? — Josh Lanyon

The way of creating believable characters is not by conforming to a set of PC rules. — Mark Haddon

I believe that if the story is fleshed out and the characters more believable, the reader is more likely to take the journey with them. In addition, the plot can be more complex. My characters are very real to me, and I want each of my characters to be different. — Michael Robotham

Storytellers seldom let facts get in the way of perpetuating a legend, although a few facts add seasoning and make the legend more believable. — John H. Alexander

I'm half Asian, so people immediately go, "Oh, you do kung fu," like that's what we do. We wake up, we do kung fu, we brush our teeth. It's just assumed that you're not working your ass off to make this believable and make this something great, and we absolutely are. — Maggie Q

When I want to show the kind of meanness people are capable of, to make it believable I find I have to tone it down. It's in real life that people are over the top. — Todd Solondz

To be truly effective, praise must be legitimate and pointed. Will everyone have good reason to believe this praise is true? What exactly is the praise for? In other words, I can walk around town with a megaphone, praising my employees at the top of my lungs, but if what I say isn't believable and specific, it won't have the effect I want. — Joel Manby

Faith is not about how much you believe in what you believe. Faith is about believing that the One you believe in is believable. — Tony Evans

The same tantalizing guile and sublime skill ... [The series is] reinforced in its claim to be one of the major literary works of this century ... Only two other writers that this reviewer can think of have each created an entire, discrete and compelling world, a totally believable entity which one might wish to inhabit, and they are Joyce and Proust. It is not pretentious to place Patrick O'Brian in the first canon of literature ... — Kevin Myers

I feel that for the story of 'Romeo and Juliet' to be impactful, it has to be believable, and there has to be a certain level of chemistry between the two characters. — Hailee Steinfeld

In order for us to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves. It's not necessary that the lies be particularly believable, but merely that they be erected as barriers to truth. These barriers to truth are necessary because without them many deplorable acts would become impossibilities. Truth must at all costs be avoided. — Derrick Jensen

Being able to draw means being able to put things in believable space. People who don't draw very well can't do that. — David Hockney

I remember hearing a good story about Jack Nicholson working with Stanley Kubrick on The Shining [1980]. Nicholson was saying that, as an actor, you always want to try to make things real. And believable. When he was working with Kubrick, he finished a take and said, "I feel like that was real." And Kubrick said, "Yes, it's real, but it's not interesting". — Owen Wilson

For me the voice is the most important, but making your singing believable makes a great performer. — Hollie Cavanagh

It's a lot tougher to play soccer and make it look believable. But in boxing, it was easier for me. I got injured a lot more in the soccer world. In soccer, I pulled muscles. I thought boxing was going to be tougher. — Kuno Becker

Believe in the unbelievable and your belief will become believable — David Whelan

I like to make sure that I'm believable. If I don't believe me, then there's a lot of people that don't believe me, but if I can believe that I'm doing it, then I know the audience will, too. — Mekhi Phifer

Several shades of the color, cloudy, silvery shades, churn underneath the surface of his skin, making him look marbled, textured. It paints a barely believable portrait. Every feature on him works in harmony to create, well, a person. But he's unlike any person I've ever seen. — Chelsea Scott

John Wells and Christopher Chulack were pretty honest from the get-go in our first meeting about 'Southland.' They were looking to create characters that were believable in the environment of the LAPD - multi-dimensional, layered characters with real flaws; good-hearted cops mixed with the perfect amount of heroism and irony. — Shawn Hatosy

I feel like my responsibility as an actor is to make characters as compelling and believable as possible. — Kevin Bacon

I want to be funny, but it has to be a believable funny. — Kevin Hart

The impossible is more believable than the highly improbable. — Louis Sachar

With singing, the name of the game is to make yourself believable. When somebody hears you sing a song, and they say, 'Oh, that must have happened to him,' that's when you know you're transmitting. It's like being a good actor. You make people feel things, emotions and what not. — Ray Charles

To be a dog woman is not necessarily to be downtrodden; that has very little to do with it. In these pictures every woman's a dog woman, not downtrodden, but powerful. To be bestial is good. It's physical. Eating, snarling, all activities to do with sensation are positive. To picture a woman as a dog is utterly believable. — Paula Rego

I don't reflect on sort of the age of the roles that I get. It's usually just what plays into what's believable - 'Am I believable at this age?' — Joel Kinnaman

ABC's intelligently hilarious sitcom 'Modern Family' depicts a gay-male marriage in which both partners are refreshingly dimensional, believable human beings. The writers dare to make them flawed and thus fully delineated, but they're not flawed in the silly, stereotypical ways that once dominated such portrayals. — Tom Shales

To me, you couldn't write a character like J. Edgar Hoover and have it be believable. I mean, he was a crock pot of eccentricities. We couldn't even fit all his eccentricities into [ the same named] movie. — Dustin Lance Black

Young children are unlikely to have their self-esteem strengthened from excessive praise or flattery. On the contrary, it may raise some doubts in children; many children can see through flattery and may even dismiss an adult who heaps on praise as a poor source of support-one who is not very believable. — Lilian Katz

Goals that are believable are achievable. — Idowu Koyenikan

I stepped toward the car, trying to plan what to do, which was impossible because I did not know what they wanted, or even who they were. It was no longer believable that it was merely a random crazy - not if he knew where I lived. But who was it? Who had any reason to act like this? Among the living, I mean, because there were plenty of former victims who might have loved to come after me, but they were all far beyond any sort of action at all, other than decomposition. I — Jeff Lindsay

A neutral observer would not find this world to be believable. Ergo, the cause of said unbelievable world must place similar stretch marks on the imagination. Step — N.D. Wilson

You have to create characters - certainly in series TV - who people engage with. They don't have to be nice; you don't have to agree with them. But they do have to be compulsively watchable and believable and human, and you want to know what happens to them. — Michael Hirst

Working with children is a whole other ball game. They're like little animals. You have to keep the camera turned on them all the time. Sometimes it takes a 41-minute take to get one sentence out in a believable way. — Vera Farmiga

Guys Rule's girl is here and she's like an actual girl with an actual brain. un-freaking-believable. — Jay Crownover

The story she had told me was possible, but it was not believable. — Giacomo Casanova

I think human beings will always still really enjoy using our imaginations, and 'Fringe' allows you to do that. It's slightly scary and believable. There just might be an alternate universe. There just might be people on the other side that are like us, living a different life. — Jill Scott

My goal in life is to bring to the screen really believable depictions that make you think, "Damn, I have to look within myself." — Romany Malco

I think one of the things you have to learn if you're going to create believable characters is never to make generalizations about groups of people. — Mark Haddon

I don't think fake people living in a fake house in a fake suburb are any less dismissible or believable than a fake psychic attending a fake school in a fake town. Nothing's inherently believable about any kind of fiction, because all of it's untrue. — Heidi Julavits

We exponents of horror do much better than those Method actors. We make the unbelievable believable. More often than not, they make the believable unbelievable. — Vincent Price

Creating a believable world on the ship was very important, and technically they got better and better and better at showing the ship too. — Patrick Stewart

A plausible rumor / Seems a lot more believable / Than the truth itself. — Kobo Abe

I do crazy amounts of research. I want this stuff to 'work,' so to speak. I need to be, at least to me, believable - because if I feel - if I cannot invest some element of verisimilitude, the reader is absolutely not going to buy in. — Greg Rucka

I want to be believable in anything I take on. — Marlon Wayans

You need to be real enough to be believable, but you don't necessarily have to be real enough to be real. There is a distinction. — Bradley Whitford

The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it. — Flannery O'Connor

I love making characters real and believable, through my own experience and choices. — Minka Kelly

What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find
in the grime of the everyday ... he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same. He wanted, quite simply, for the world to be a better place, and he was in the habit of hoping for it. — Colum McCann

I don't understand that, because I think that what people like most about the show is that they recognize themselves in the characters and their problems, so the more believable the family is, the more we can draw the audience in. — Patricia Richardson

A philosophy that begins in doubt assails what no-one believes, and invites us to nothing believable — Roger Scruton

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

To take full advantage of computer animation, you have to pay as much attention to the believable as you do the unbelievable. — John Lasseter

It was easy for viewers to identify with our show. The characters were believable. — Desi Arnaz

My biggest lesson ... was to try and create narrators that were believable ... so the listener becomes really invested in the story or the song. — Kristian Bush

Which is the more believable of the two, Moses or China? — Blaise Pascal

Many of Judy Blume's books - which I devoured when I was growing up and where I found characters that were believable because they were a lot like me - caused considerable consternation when they were first published, but now they're widely accepted as an essential part of the children's literary canon. — Jeff Kinney

I do a lot with characters' sense of identity. I also like challenging stereotypes, gender roles, things like that. Give me a stereotype or a genre expectation and the first thing I want to do is stand it on its head. In the Nightrunner books I wanted to see if I could create a believable gay hero, one who wasn't someone's sidekick or a victim. — Lynn Flewelling

I saw my potential as artistic director, which is very different from designer. Fashion companies might have $200 million to $300 million in annual sales - Hugo Boss has €2.5 billion. I have to create a world that is believable and also relevant in 7,000 sales points around the world. — Jason Wu

From the book "Age of Armageddon: The Spirit of Krynn"

"Is this another tall tale?" Eva quickly asks her suspicion aroused by the Minstrels previous teasing trick. Although it is unlikely that he actually did meet the keeper of the dead, he sold it well enough. Fantasy is a little more believable when you can throw 50,000 volt lightning from your fingertips. — Ryan Tyler Palmer

Since we didn't use guns, we wanted to make sure we could earn the ability to win the audience over by making it believable. A lot of what you do when you work out in that mode is use your mental energy. — Lucy Liu

Change was a constant in Walt Disney's commitment to tell a story well, to bring it to an audience through the technology of the day, and to push that technology so that rather than controlling the story, it enhanced the story and gave it an opportunity to touch people, to speak to each of them individually, to make it believable. — Newton Lee

I can tell you that events were incremental, that the unbelievable became the believable and, ultimately, the normal. — Ralph Webster

My drawing, like that of most cartoonists, is intended first of all to be functional: to create believable space and communicate information. My strongest point in drawing has always been my ability to show characters' nonverbal communication through facial expression and posture. — Jessica Abel

An actor puts himself in the hands of a director. And the director's first responsibility, obviously, is to tell the story, but the smallest thing that's not true reads on the screen. So if a director sees that an actor is not believable, he needs to help him become believable. — Tobin Bell

Intrinsically evil people are often hypocrites who make a show of their Goodguy Badge; without an enemy to plague them they could never in any believable sense become Good. This — Anton Szandor LaVey

I want a kiss to be so believable it gives the reader shivers. — Laurell K. Hamilton

The bigger the lie, the more believable it becomes to the average Arab citizen. Thus, Arab media never fail to be less than outrageous. They blamed the defeat on none other than Israel, as though self-defense and self-preservation was not a right to be exercised by the Jewish enemy. — Nonie Darwish

Life isn't meant to be believable. It's meant to be magical. Haven't you heard? Truth is stranger than fiction. — Rebecca Serle

There is no trick to writing a believable love story, a heartbreaking scene or real-sounding dialogue. All you need is to tell the truth. It's always heartbreaking. — Ethan Hawke

Love is both hard and soft. It is the most believable truth and fiction. It is something we fight for and fight with. It is the yin and yang. It is the most contradictory of emotions, making you believe in both the extraordinary existence of heaven and scorches of hell. If you allow it, a saturation of complexities can destroy it and leave you desperately choking for the remnants, clawing for a miniscule flake of ash of what you had . True love is a rare miracle held in the highest veneration. Blessed are those who even come close its illumination. Only those who are selflessly brave can become victorious and claim this exceptional phenomenon, if just for a memory in time. — S.V.C. Ricketts

What makes fantastic declarations believable is, in part, the vehemence with which they're proffered. Again, in the world of spirituality as well as of pop psychology, intensity of personal belief is evidence of truth. It is considered very bad form - even abuse - to challenge the veracity of any personal testimony that might be offered in a twelve-step group or on a talk show, unless the testimony itself is equivocal ... Whatever sells, whatever many people believe strongly, must be true. — Wendy Kaminer

If the characters on 'The West Wing' were watching a TV show wherein a character like Trump was leading in the polls, they wouldn't find it believable. — Aaron Sorkin

Ironically, in today's marketplace successful nonfiction has to be unbelievable, while successful fiction must be believable. — Jerry B. Jenkins

If you dont speak, they will know you know more than you're telling them. And if they know that, they'll find a way to get what you know out of you. Believe me, they'll get everything out, Willie. Don't have any qualms about it
make your story good and make it believable. Silence won't work! This was an expert giving me the best advice she could. From that point on, I worked hard not to remember the people I loved, to try instead to create another life, a false life ... I tried to become a person concerned only with very simple things
and scared. I tried to become the woman I needed to be in order to live. — Diet Eman

It has to be absolutely believable. It's also going between images and scenes with nudity and sexuality that would be seen, in conventional terms, as kind of sexually exciting. It's up against things that are much more medical and gynecological, and notoriously we, as a culture and a society, have some issues with that kind of thing. — Michael Sheen

The difference between nonfiction and fiction is that fiction must be absolutely believable. — Mark Twain

History is indeed stranger than fiction. The twists and turns of human history are too outlandish for to be believable in any work of fiction. — A.E. Samaan

An idea has no worth at all without believable characters to implement it; a plot without characters is like a tennis court without players. Daffy Duck is to a Buck Rogers story what John McEnroe was to tennis. Personality. That is the key, the drum, the fife. Forget the plot. — Chuck Jones

When I started to learn how to read, I discovered the same kind of power. I could create an environment that I didn't have, and I could order this environment in the way that I couldn't in my actual life. Then, when I learned to write, I learned that I could do this not only for myself, but for other people. I could create whole things that were believable, at least to myself, at that point. And in this way, I began to wield an authority and a power that I had not had before. In other words, every child goes through this. Some pick football and some pick the library. I picked the library. — Donald Richie

The sea of excited people, the flood of colored lights, and the unending stream of cars were proof that the days of the Holocaust were now part of the history books. I awakened from my horrible memories and almost agreed with the opinion voiced by many that the ghetto was a dead issue and the whole period surrounding it too far-fetched, too cruelly-sadistic, to be believable today, assuming it really existed.... The reign of man-eating furnaces is hard for a reasonable mind to grasp, even that of someone who was a victim himself. — Joseph Bau

Every song that has been a hit for me has been honest and truthful. I have to believe that same formula will work on this (television) show. It has to be believable and honest. — Reba McEntire

Most of us came out of Popeye, so turning Popeye into something believable was tricky enough. — Gil Kane

The purpose of a spiritual path or religion is to provide a precise and believable way into what seems unbelievable. — Geneen Roth