Interesting Real Life Quotes & Sayings

I'd always heard stories about how Harpo Marx was the most talkative of the Marx brothers. I found it interesting that someone you never got to hear speak in films would never not speak in real life. — Harmony Korine

Why read fiction when real life can be just as interesting? — LHandLG

I'm not very romantic in real life. I guess love is the thing that makes us do the most extraordinary things - the emotion that can bring us highest or lowest, or be the most transformative - and extremes of emotion are always interesting to write about. — Jojo Moyes

The life of the mind is always more interesting than the real. The idea is often more interesting than the actual. — Rob Chapman

I think real life reflects your movies. In your life, you pick stuff that influences what movie roles you wanna pick. I think if you've got an interesting life, you wanna do interesting movies about interesting things. — Chris Tucker

We want to see a struggle. We want to see people falling over but getting themselves back up on their feet, and that's what's extraordinary- ordinary people and their struggle. There's nothing as interesting as real life out your window. You walk down the street for half an hour, I'll give you half an hour of drama. — Ricky Gervais

If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you're a writer you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act - truth is always subversive. — Anne Lamott

Bette Davis lived long enough to hear the Kim Carnes song, 'Bette Davis Eyes'. The lyrics to that song were not very interesting. But the fact of the song was the proof of an acknowledgement that in the twentieth century we lived through an age of immense romantic personalities larger than life, yet models for it, too - for good or ill. Like twin moons, promising a struggle and an embrace, the Davis eyes would survive her - and us. Kim Carnes has hardly had a consistent career, but that one song - sluggish yet surging, druggy and dreamy - became an instant classic. It's like the sigh of the islanders when they behold their Kong. And I suspect it made the real eyes smile, whatever else was on their mind. — David Thomson

It did not matter that people went about talking about nice books, interesting books, sad books, 'stories' - they would never be that to her. They were people. More real than actual people. They came nearer. In life everything was so scrappy and mixed up. In a book the author was there in every word. — Dorothy M. Richardson

I was born with the impression that what happened in books was much for reasonable, and interesting, and real, in some ways, than what happened in life. — Anne Tyler

I think my life is often more interesting in the tabloids than it is in real life - or less; it depends. But I'm curious. I just try and see what they're going to make up next, and I try to just have fun with it and not take it all too seriously, because otherwise you can't function. — Rachel Miner

I've always been afraid that if I played Sim City I'd just get virtual junk mail for occupant/resident since it is so much like real life!!! It would suck to be invisible in two worlds at once, as always that gives me an interesting story idea.
Have to run someone, no doubt a solicitor, is at my door ... — Neil Leckman

Since the show [Helix] is based in real science, there are real-life epidemic scares out there, throughout history, where there are these huge viruses that have wiped out huge populations. So, we're dealing with something that the CDC hasn't seen before, but it comes from a virus. That's something that's based in reality, and then you put the science fiction on that and it's a really interesting combination. — Kyra Zagorsky

Life in a small town is like an intricately plotted novel, and even though I had read every book in the public library by the time I was fourteen, I found the real people around me saying and doing far more interesting things than did the imaginary book characters. — Maxine Cheshire

I spend plenty of time in London and it doesn't scare me, but it's a lonely place, even if you've got friends there. My job takes me all around the world, meeting lots of interesting people. But I think if I couldn't get home, if I couldn't get back to what I consider my real life I'd be frightened. — Shirley Henderson

Real life is never quite as interesting as the story told afterward. — Laurence Overmire

Some people like drama so much that they have to start inventing things because real life isn't interesting enough for them. — Lisa Ballantyne

There's an enormous difference between being a story writer and being a regular person. As a person, it's your duty to stay on a straight and even keel, not to break down blubbering in the streets, not to pull rude drivers from their cars, not to swing from the branches of trees. But as a writer it's your duty to lie and to view everything in life, however outrageous, as an interesting possibility. You may need to be ruthless or amoral in your writing to be original. Telling a story straight from real life is only being a reporter, not a creator. You have to make your story bigger, better, more magical, more meaningful than life is, no matter how special or wonderful in real life the moment may have been. — Rick Bass

When I was in college, I did sort of want to be a journalist. Being an actor, you kind of have the same interest. You go into a story, and you tell it from your point of view for people who aren't there. That's what an actor does with a character. But the real life is more more interesting. — Sigourney Weaver

The other day I happened to be reading a careful, interesting account of the state of British higher education. The government is a kind of market-oriented government and they came out with an official paper, a 'White Paper' saying that it is not the responsibility of the state to support any institution that can't survive in the market. So, if Oxford is teaching philosophy, the arts, Greek history, medieval history, and so on, and they can't sell it on the market, why should they be supported? Because life consists only of what you can sell in the market and get back, nothing else. That is a real pathology. — Noam Chomsky

I'm a bit insane when it comes to doing my own stunts and getting down and dirty. It's fun, you know? It's things I wouldn't normally do in my real life, so when I go to work and get to beat people up and shoot guns and get waterboarded, those are things I find completely interesting. — Katee Sackhoff

Life is so interesting ... just every day life. I remember someone once saying: "Drama is real life with the boring bits taken out." — Ricky Gervais

And he judged of others by himself, not believing in what he saw, and always believing that every man had his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy and under the cover of night. All personal life rested on secrecy, and possibly it was partly on that account that civilised man was so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected. — Anton Chekhov

I think real humans are so complicated, and often [characters] are written more one-dimensional without maybe even the writer knowing it. I've felt numerous moments in my life where my most confident moment and my most insecure moment were exactly the same time. There's nothing funny or interesting about perfection. — Kristen Bell

Humor is very interesting to me. My films are not comedies, but there's comedy in them from time to time, absurdities, just like in real life. — David Lynch

It's a lot more interesting to learn and discover real-life principles when they are revealed in the form of a story. — Andy Andrews

The notion of "cause and effect" is sometimes useful in real life, and it can even be interesting in art, but I'm more interested in "cause and cause" or "effect and effect" or "and and and". — Kevin Mcpherson Eckhoff

How is it every time we're talking about the real world, you manage to bring up fantasy, and every time we're talking about fantasy, you manage to bring up the real world?

Travis shrugged. "My fantasies are more interesting than the real world and machines and tools are more interesting than you guys' fantasies. — Jeff Zentner

The truth, though is that Cantor's work and its context are so totally interesting and beautiful that there's no need for breathless Prometheusizing of the poor guy's life. The real irony is that the view of (Infinity) as some forbidden zone or road to insanity-which view was very old and powerful and haunted math for 2000+ years- is precisely what Cantor's own work overturned. Saying that (Infinity) drove Cantor mad is sort of like mourning St. George's loss to the dragon: it's not only wrong but insulting. — David Foster Wallace

It is so interesting when you meet an actor in real life and they look completely different. — Cate Blanchett

[While writing history], I've kept the most interesting company imaginable with people long gone. Some I've come to know better than many I know in real life, since in real life we don't get to read other people's mail. — David McCullough

It was a pity that movies and live TV left New York for Hollywood. London theater, movies, television - until (Britain's) money ran out - were always better than ours since the city was the political capital of the country, as well as the artistic and literary one. In L.A. we've always been slightly sealed off from real life. It's no accident that two of our most interesting directors, Woody Allen and Bob Altman, are more or less settled in the real world. — Gore Vidal

The interesting thing is, when you play a real-life character or someone based in a book, you always come up against people's preconceptions of what they have in their heads. — Harry Lloyd

I did this movie right after it about the life of Chet Baker. It's called Born to Be Blue. In that situation, there's a real clear character you're drawing on. It's a real person. It's really exciting and interesting to do the research to figure out how to make that a nuanced, three-dimensional human being. — Ethan Hawke

Lady Esmeralda's background was no less interesting than herself; it was a colourful picture of luxury and squalor. Armies of servants thronged the great houses; coaches rumbled up to the doors. Huge meals were eaten at tables laden with silver and lit by candles; there was drinking and gambling and duelling. Highwaymen frequented lonely roads and footpads lurked in the streets. Thieves were hanged and crowds gathered to see the grisly entertainment. The picture of life in those far-off days became so real and clear that I felt as if I had lived in them myself. It was almost as if I remembered them. Sometimes I returned to them in my dreams (which was not always enjoyable) and occasionally I found myself — D.E. Stevenson

The interesting (and sometimes scary) thing about living a purposeful life is you begin to realize that, in a very real way, your life is not your own. You're not here to just get all the good stuff for yourself - and maybe your loved ones - so you can live a happy, pleasure-filled existence. You are part of a larger organism, a larger system, and all the good that you receive, all the talent you possess, everything that you have, is not for your benefit only - but for the benefit of the whole system. And the more you surrender to this, the more the universe will pour its bounty through you so you can be a bigger giver. — Derek Rydall

You need to try to find a way to humanize your villains. Genuine villains, in real life, still have mothers and daughters and sisters, and they fall in love. They don't walk around with a big sign saying, "Bad guy," on their head. They think they're good guys. If you can play that, I think it makes it more interesting. — Mark Strong

There is something about dance that is actually a great tension. There is something that is incredibly freeing about dancing for dancers who do it. They tend to be really arty and interesting people in real life. At the same time, they have an incredibly rigorous training schedule. — George Nolfi

I don't have very much interest in trends and fashions. I don't follow the fashion shows and stuff like that into my real life. But I'm very, very interested in how people put themselves together, how women and men announce themselves to the world, through what they put on their bodies. Whether we choose Birkenstocks or whether we choose Burberry - it all signifies something and it's really interesting to me. — Meryl Streep

The more real I got on 'The Bourne Identity,' the more interesting it got. So 'Fair Game' was the chance to go a few more steps in that direction. In fact, I discovered this whole other world that I had ignored in the 'Bourne' franchise, which is the domestic life of a spy, and how you make the two halves of your life coexist. — Doug Liman

I like her. She makes life interesting. She, herself, is interesting, I suppose. She talks right from the heart. I appreciate her frankness and I like the fact that she doesn't force the natural flow of a conversation. There's personality in her words. She thus gets to the core of things and that's important because with her - I can talk knowing that the talk is real! Oh believe me, it's amazingly real! And she also gives me the opportunity to listen as fully and completely as possible. And I can't seem to get her out of my head [ ... ] — Virginia Woolf

Men are more interesting in books than they are in real life. — Mary Ann Shaffer

The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything. In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition. — Carl Schmitt

I just saw Titanic, which is a $200 million film about a real-life disaster at sea, but according to Hollywood Logic, none of the actual passengers was interesting enough, so the writer-director had to invent a Romeo and Juliet-style fictional couple to heat up the catastrophe. This seems a tiny bit like giving Anne Frank a wacky best friend, to perk up that attic. — Paul Rudnick

My philosophy: Don't get caught with a fixed philosophy, a set
of safe beliefs, a particular way of life.

Experiment! With live, with love.

Run an exploration of the real and the true degrees of freedom
of life, of love, of the human condition, inside self and in one's
style of life.

Move! Into new spaces beyond one's present concepts of possible/probable/certain real spaces.

Far vaster than I now know are the innermost/outermost realities.

Far more interesting than I now feel are the deeps of the space, the beyond within, the infinite without.

Love and loving are basic.

Hostility is redundant.

Fear is non-sense.

"Death" is a myth.

I am I. — John C. Lilly

I remember Anthony Perkins saying, "Real is not necessarily interesting." So real is not enough. But what happens as an actor is that you're really trained to listen and to be open and have empathy. It's such a natural consequence that you end up being more political. You can empathize with the mother whose kids are going to be sent to Iraq, or you can emphasize with the mother who is losing their child to a disease. How could you not then be active? So you're automatically drawn to that aspect in the rest of your life. — Susan Sarandon

A book had always been a door to another world ... a world much more interesting and fantastical than reality. But she had finally discovered that life could be even more wonderful than fantasy.
And that love could fill the real world with magic. — Lisa Kleypas

I watch a lot of different films. A lot of different performances and I find a lot of little things from the films or things that actors do or people in real life who have behaviors or idiosyncrasies that I like or find interesting and I try to remember that. And then I'll do a prayer. I'll do a prayer to ask the character or the spirit of the character to come and visit me. And let's work together. — Wesley Snipes

Human life is so full of pain, that once past the youthful delusion that a sad countenance is interesting, and an incurable woe the most delightful thing possible, the mind instinctively turns where it can get rest, and cheer and sunshine. And the friend who can bring to it the largest portion of these is, of a natural necessity, the most useful, the most welcome, and the most dear. — Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

In real life people fart, in the movies, people don't. Why not? Farts are a repressed minority. The mouth gets to say all kinds of things, but the other place is supposed to keep quiet. But maybe our lower colons have something interesting to say. Maybe we should listen to them. Farts are human, more human than a lot of people I know. I think we should bring them out of the water closet and into the parlor. — Mel Brooks

I developed this fantasy world. I found that that was much more fun and more interesting and exciting than real life was to me. Then, once I got the guitar going when I was a teenager, I set sail for the direction I've been in my whole life. — Don McLean

I think I'm a part of all the characters I play, definitely at different times in my life. In real life, I'm kind of a tomboy. I like to read a lot I like watching T.V. I don't think I'm as interesting as my characters, but I like doing what I do. — Sprague Grayden

I don't tend to write straight dramas where real life just impinges. But because I don't, when I do, it is very interesting to slap people in the face with just an absolute of life. — Joss Whedon

Why interesting and important? Because women are interesting and important in real life. They are not an afterthought of nature, they are not secondary players in human destiny, and every society has always known that. Without women capable of giving birth, human populations will die out. That is why the mass rape and murder of women, girls, and children has long been a feature of genocidal wars, and of other campaigns meant to subdue and exploit a population. — Margaret Atwood

the more interesting their conversation, the more cultured they are, the more they will be trapped into thinking that they are effective at what they are doing in real business (something psychologists call the halo effect, the mistake of thinking that skills in, say, skiing translate unfailingly into skills in managing a pottery workshop or a bank department, or that a good chess player would be a good strategist in real life). — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Outside there a lot of powerful stuff, starting from mind movies up to movies like drama, real life, horror, mysteries and many other. Music which makes your day interesting, quotes which change your thought, books which provoke and many other stuff... (So now you know what's everything about, Good Luck with the other Stuff!) — Deyth Banger

Mom went on to tell me, as we sat there, that she really believed your personal life was personal. Secrets, she felt, rarely explained or excused anything in real life, or were even all that interesting. People shared too much, she said, not too little. She thought you should be able to keep your private life private for any reason or for no reason. — Will Schwalbe

Perhaps this is what Henry James meant when he talked about the "irresponsibility" of characters. Characters are irresponsible, art is irresponsible when compared to life, because it is first and foremost important that a character be real, and as readers or watchers we tend to applaud any effort made towards the construction of that reality. We do not, of course, indulge actual people in the world this way at all. In real life, the fact that something seems real to someone is not enough to interest us, or to convince us that that reality is interesting. But the self-reality of fictional characters is deeply engrossing, which is why villains are lovable in literature in ways that they are not in life. — James Wood

It is quite surreal having a film made about your life. The whole process of turning real life into drama is interesting in itself, but even more so when it is your own life being put into the narrative forge. — Heather Brooke

The term IRL (in real life) is like a safe word for millennials. It's a reminder that despite spending majority of our time meticulously crafting online personas, we still have vital organs that need to be taken care of and family members we should probably interact with. More than anything, it's a reminder of the world we were introduced to the day we left our mother's wombs. Those brave women didn't push us out of their vaginas just so we could strive to be interesting online and disconnected in the real world. — Greg Dybec

People in books were always so charming, and all their thoughts and actions so comprehensible. They all invariably had a clear, well-defined object in life, and strove through a few hundred engrossing pages to attain this object. They were all noble and generous, and their lives were bright and beautiful. What interesting and delightful moments Irene had passed in their society! They had made her laugh and cry and suffer and rejoice, and had entertained her with the brilliancy of their wit. How dull and colourless real people had appeared beside these heroes and heroines of fiction. — Aimee Dostoyevsky

To be an actress and act crazy is really fun for me, to be able to be acting like you'd never be able to act in your real life and scream and freak out. It's an interesting test for an actor. — Alexandra Daddario

Every once in awhile, when you can see shades of the person's real interior life, I think that's interesting. — Donal Logue

The real contribution of Rihani consists in having given us, in both Arabic and English, what may be considered the most vivid and interesting account of common-day life as it is lived at present in the hitherto little known Arabia. — Philip Khuri Hitti

In the books I read the sinners are always more interesting than the saints, and in real life good people are dismally dull. I've no desire to be wicked, but I do want to be happy. A short life and a gay one for me and I'm willing to pay for my pleasure if it is necessary. — Louisa May Alcott

Every person lives his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy. — Anton Chekhov

Law and society turns this conventional view on its head. "Real law" is law as it is lived in society, and the abstract ideal is itself a human artifact. Many interesting questions follow. How does real law actually operate? How are law and everyday life intertwined? Where does law as abstraction come from, and what purposes does it serve? What can we learn from the disparity between abstract law and real law? And, why is the idealized version of law so resilient even in the face of extensive contrary experience? — Kitty Calavita

Anytime you want to hear about graph partitioning, I will be glad to tell you what I know about graph partitioning. It remains a standard problem. I think it's an interesting problem, because it shows up in a variety of guises in real life. — Brian Kernighan

Al forms of consensus about 'great' books and 'perennial' problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of 'what is already known.' Those great books don't only need custodians and transmitters. To stay alive, they also need adversaries. The most interesting ideas are heresies. — Susan Sontag

Addie believes in books. They are more interesting than real life and easier to understand. Sometimes you can guess the ending. Things usually work out, and if they don't, you can always tell yourself it was only a book. — Kim Church

Victory must be real. It must be earned. That means it must be rare and difficult, against steep odds, and defeat must be the other. — Rick Riordan

I do care about real life. It's just not as interesting as what's in my books. — Christina Dodd

Know how to get close to it: mountains are often seen from far off - beautiful, interesting, full of challenges. But what happens when we try to draw closer? Roads run all around them, flowers grow between you and your objective, what seemed so clear on the map is tough in real life. So try all the paths and all the tracks until eventually one day you're standing in front of the top that you yearn to reach. — Paulo Coelho

The lesson of every extinction, says the Smithsonian's Doug Erwin, is that we can't predict what the world will be 5 million years later by looking at the survivors.
There will be plenty of surprises. Let's face it: who would've predicted the existence of turtles? Who would ever have imagined that an organism would essentially turn itself inside out, pulling its shoulder girdle inside its ribs to form a carapace? If turtles didn't exist, no vertebrate biologist would've suggested that anything would do that: he'd have been laughed out of town. The only real prediction you can make is that life will go on. And that it will be interesting. — Alan Weisman

I find that the more I depend on real life, the less interesting the story is. It's much more common for me to take something that almost-happened, or I wish had happened, and then follow that possibility. — Sarah Dessen

The thought processes that go through my head when I'm playing a game compared to the thought processes in real life are very, very different. And they're more interesting to me than what you think about when you're doing the dishes, cleaning the yard, watching TV, driving or watching a movie. — John Romero

One of the reasons I got into acting to begin with is that I was trying to figure out how life worked. It was interesting to me to try and follow how other people, real or imaginary, would deal with problems, because I was trying to deal with my own problems. — Michael Shannon

I've never been conscious of having any real career plan, and I do not have a wish-list of actors, directors, screenwriters, or cameramen I'm hoping to work with. Life, I feel, has a way of leading us to the right situations and people, or at least to interesting ones. — Viggo Mortensen

And that leaves you with an interesting choice ... Do you sacrifice you own happiness and feelings of peace in order to have this relationship, or do you start to get well and choose a real life ... ? — Nic Sheff

Surveys of thousands of gamers have shown that they're more likely to play real music if they play a music videogame. So it's an interesting relationship where the games aren't replacing something we do in real life, they're serving as a springboard to a goal we might have in real life, like learning to play an instrument. — Jane McGonigal