Quotes & Sayings About Realism

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. — Salman Rushdie

Our growing dependence on technologies no one seems to understand or control has given rise to feelings of powerlessness and victimization. We find it more and more difficult to achieve a sense of continuity, permanence, or connection with the world around us. Relationships with others are notably fragile; goods are made to be used up and discarded; reality is experienced as an unstable environment of flickering images. Everything conspires to encourage escapist solutions to the psychological problems of dependence, separation, and individuation, and to discourage the moral realism that makes it possible for human beings to come to terms with existential constraints on their power and freedom. — Christopher Lasch

Man is certain of nothing but his ability to fail. It is the deepest faith we have, and the unbeliever- the blasphemer, the dissenter- will stimulate in us the most righteous of furies. — Ken Kesey

Extremely self-conscious in its craft, in many ways The Hand of Ethelberta is an exploration of fiction as illusion, which involves parody of the conventions it employs; romance, melodrama and farce, and a rejection of realism for absurdist and surrealistic effects. The 'hand' of Ethelberta is an obvious, ironic allusion to courtship, and the sub-title, 'A Comedy in Chapters', suggests the novel's affinity with the conventions of Restoration and eighteenth-century comedy of manners. — Geoffrey Harvey

I was a big fan of John Cassavetes, his wife, Gena Rowlands, and that era of filmmaking which was about realism and which represented the antithesis of the dreamy escapism you found in musicals. — Carmen Ejogo

This man, who for twenty-five years has been reading and writing about art, and in all that time has never understood anything about art, has for twenty-five years been hashing over other people's ideas about realism, naturalism and all that nonsense; for twenty-five years he has been reading and writing about what intelligent people already know and about what stupid people don't want to know
which means that for twenty-five years he's been taking nothing and making nothing out of it. And with it all, what conceit! What pretension! — Anton Chekhov

People who are too optimistic seem annoying. This is an unfortunate misinterpretation of what an optimist really is.
An optimist is neither naive, nor blind to the facts, nor in denial of grim reality. An optimist believes in the optimal usage of all options available, no matter how limited. As such, an optimist always sees the big picture. How else to keep track of all that's out there? An optimist is simply a proactive realist.
An idealist focuses only on the best aspects of all things (sometimes in detriment to reality); an optimist strives to find an effective solution. A pessimist sees limited or no choices in dark times; an optimist makes choices.
When bobbing for apples, an idealist endlessly reaches for the best apple, a pessimist settles for the first one within reach, while an optimist drains the barrel, fishes out all the apples and makes pie.
Annoying? Yes. But, oh-so tasty! — Vera Nazarian

Ideologically, I have a lot of problems with that, especially when people toss around that form of story as realism. What's called "realism" is actually highly formulaic. — Lucy Corin

The first season of 'Community' stumbled a bit because the plotlines too often veered into realism, but that is not a problem anymore. Not when prize episodes concern a campuswide blanket fort, or a secret garden with a magic trampoline. — Rob Sheffield

Why harrow oneself by looking on the worst side?... Because it is sometimes necessary. — Agatha Christie

Realism implicated that imperialism and imperialist conquests or prestige can be pursued as part of the animus dominandi, the desire to dominate, which is the social force that determines political activity. — Nayef Al-Rodhan

The monster I kill every day is the monster of realism. The monster who attacks me every day is destruction. Out of the duel comes the transformation. I turn destruction into creation over and over again. — Anais Nin

Scholars, who pride themselves on speaking their minds, often engage in a form of self-censorship which is called "realism." To be "realistic" in dealing with a problem is to work only among the alternatives which the most powerful in society put forth. It is as if we are all confined to a, b, c, or d in the multiple choice test, when we know there is another possible answer. American society, although it has more freedom of expression than most societies in the world, thus sets limits beyond which respectable people are not supposed to think or speak. — Howard Zinn

My songs are not pretty. They're what I call optimistic realism. — Laura Marling

I begin my life. I live again. I meet a young girl called Valeria. She smiles easily. She laughs tender sounds that pull at my heart. I'm too young to be profound but she makes me feel so safe. So cherished. I am thirty years old. I bump into a woman I knew when she was a girl. Valeria looks annoyed to see me. She lives in the future. Where the world is turning. I live within the past. Where the people are trapped and screaming and alone. I live within the past when Valeria and I were in love. She's waiting for the cab to come, her foot tapping against the sidewalk. Her eyes glancing at her watch every few minutes. I'm eager to reunite our lives through some kind of friendship. I'm so eager to know her again, as she was when she was a child. But Valeria lives within the future. I live within the past. Have the two ever gotten along? Have they ever even met? — F.K. Preston

Hollywood always wanted me to be pretty, but I fought for realism. — Bette Davis

I have been definitely influenced more by Latin American writers than by any other type of writer. They are very close in terms of voice - their humor, their fatalism, their ... well, that over-used term 'magical realism.' It's a wonderful term that's just been used so much, we don't know what it means anymore. — Jessica Hagedorn

I believe one of the important differences between creating literature and just telling a story around the campfire is that in literature you're recreating the experience of life, not just relaying a 'this happened, then that happened' kind of narrative. The specific details and layers of depth that make the world of the story - and what the character is experiencing in that world - as real as possible are elements I love as a reader and, consequently, elements I strive to use effectively as a writer. — Lara Campbell McGehee

And you'd be left there like a fucking dumpling. You'd be standing there. A fucking dumpling man I'm telling ye. — James Kelman

They want me to do something, and I'll do it, or I won't do it, and it'll work or not, and I'll survive or not. — Jo Walton

We all start from "naive realism," i.e., the doctrine that things
are what they seem. We think that grass is green, that stones
are hard, and that snow is cold. But physics assures us that the
greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and the coldness of
snow are not the greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and
the coldness of snow that we know in our own experience, but
something very different — Bertrand Russell

Idealism leads to realism if it is strictly thought out. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

No one can stop death, Omari. It is normal and certain. And nothing should get in the way of a person's true destiny. — Stephen Whitfield

I'll tell you what I want. Magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misinterpret things to them. I don't tell the truth. I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it! - Don't turn the light on! — Tennessee Williams

that we would receive the overwhelming message that the vast majority of adults feel they have no talent in these areas. On the other hand, if we were to conduct the same poll among 4-year-olds, we would find that virtually all of them are convinced they can sing, and virtually all of them have confidence in their ability to dance. Most of the 4-year-olds have little or no real talent, but, instead, they are endowed with incredible confidence in their own potential. This confidence, or certainty of success, is something we were all born with but we later traded in for a strong dose of what we call realism. Shortly after we reach school age, we are taught lessons about the world that revolve around us, limiting our vision and becoming realistic. — Jim Stovall

Realism sets itself at work to consider characters and events which are apparently the most ordinary and uninteresting, in order to extract from these their full value and true meaning. It would apprehend in all particulars the connection between the familiar and the extraordinary, and the seen and unseen of human nature. — George Parsons Lathrop

What is noble, lyrical, tender in the upper level shown is also with the servants, scoundrels, and scamps, as in a distorting mirror. This contrast seems to me a most appealing musical theme
to show love in its noble and crude forms, romanticism and crass realism mixed as in everyday life. — Stefan Zweig

Now that the book is out in the world, I'm amazed all over again at what my friend did for me in prompting me to ditch realism for a more magical approach. In some ways, the Golem and the Jinni are the ultimate immigrants. They aren't just new to New York or America; they're new to people. Like those around them, they wrestle with issues of religion versus doubt and duty versus self-determination - but as inescapable aspects of their own otherworldly natures. For seven years I've lived with their questions, arguments, and adventures, and it's been one of the greatest gifts of my life. — Helene Wecker

The geniuses who conduct the motion-picture business killed glamour when they decided that what the public wanted was not dream stuff, from which movies used to be made, but realism. — Hedda Hopper

Realism: the wealth of detail guarantees the truth of the tale. — Mason Cooley

Of course I know that the twins are only words on a page, and I'm certainly not the sort of writer who talks to his characters or harbours any illusions about the creative process. But at the same time, I think it's juvenile and arrogant when literary writers compulsively remind their readers that the characters aren't real. People know that already. The challenge is to make an intelligent reader suspend disbelief, to seduce them into the reality of a narrative. — Michel Faber

There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment. This kind of photography is realism. But realism is not enough - there has to be vision, and the two together can make a good photograph. — Robert Frank

When people use the term magic realism, usually they only mean 'magic' and they don't hear 'realism', whereas the way in which magic realism actually works is for the magic to be rooted in the real. It's both things. It's not just a fairytale moment. It's the surrealism that arises out of the real. — Salman Rushdie

I would sit in my room and become hysterical about the wild incredible story I was writing. And I thought I was writing realism. It never occurred to me that I was writing absurdity. Realism and absurdity are so similar in the lives of American blacks one cannot tell the difference. — Chester Himes

I need to tell you a story.'

What about?

Zachariah, Zachariah, my foundling boy. 'A boy. A boxer, a fighting man. A brother. No. About brothers, sisters. Foundlings, laid-in-the-streets. Fights, fighting. A boy, it all begins with the boy. My love. A wolf. Peter and the Wolf! Oh dear! I am very crazy! Let me - I must tell you this story.'

Why?

'I'm frightened.'

Of?

'Fractals. Patterns.'

Ah, says the fish, looking at Rachel with his wise eyes. Chaos!

'Yes,' thinks Rachel. 'Chaos. Fearful symmetry.'

Go home, says the fish, flipping over, flashing in light, and diving down into the great blue sea. — Emma Richler

Webb read fantasy; Jude read realism — Melina Marchetta

Maybe we should always assume the worst. — Chuck Palahniuk

America is exceptional in combining standard great-power realism with extravagant idealism about the country's redemptive role in creating international order. — Michael Ignatieff

There is a curious law of art ... that even the attempt to reproduce the act of seeing, when carried out with sufficient energy, tends to lose its realism and take on the unnatural glittering intensity of hallucination. — Northrop Frye

Realism to be effective must be a matter of selection.genius chooses its materials with a view to their beauty and effectiveness; mere talent copies what it thinks is nature, only to find it has been deceived by the external grossness of things. — Julia Marlowe

You start out with big dreams and I mean, big dreams artistically. You want to work with the greatest living directors, make a great movie. I wanted to make a great love story, I wanted to make a great epic and then you realize that the truth of it is that it's so hard to make a great film. It's hard to get a great role. Those big expectations change to realism pretty quickly. But what's never changed is my desire to work with great directors and to find projects that push me out of my comfort zone and keep me alive. I still don't think I've done my best work — Nicole Kidman

The realism of failure, the romance of success. — Mason Cooley

The closet is a closet, but it's also a rocket or a tree house. Your mind is a palace, as long as you go in the right rooms. — Erin Entrada Kelly

The reality of time and change seemed to me the crux of realism. — Karl R. Popper

My creativity keeps me from starving. Humanity keeps my life mundane. Loving secures my love for life, but my imagination keeps me sane. — F.K. Preston

But in order to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The seas, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death
these are things that unite us all. We resemble one another in what we see together, in what we suffer together. Dreams change from individual, but the reality of the world is common to us all. Striving towards realism is therefore legitimate, for it is basically related to the artistic adventure. — Albert Camus

I have realized that mystery is what keeps people away, and I've grown tired of smoke and mirrors. I yearn for the clean, well-lighted place. So let's peek behind the curtain and hail the others like us. The open-faced sandwiches who take risks and live big and smile with all of their teeth. These are the people I want to be around. — Amy Poehler

Be selfish sometimes. Love yourself. If you always put others before you, you will find yourself feeling beaten down by the world and that will make you bitter. Don't let the world make you bitter, not when you have such a beautiful soul. — Spencer Hoshino

Fiction inhabits the zone between the real and the impossible. The tug of those two poles is what gives it motion, vitality. Tethering fiction too tightly to the real produces plodding, lifeless stories. Letting it float too far from that anchor produces stories that are arbitrary and unpersuasive. — Vinnie Tesla

Magical realism allows an artist like myself to inject layers of meaning without being obvious. In American culture, where there is freedom of expression, this approach may seem forced, unnecessary and misunderstood. But this system of communication has become very Iranian. — Shirin Neshat

Music can transport you to another time with a couple of notes. It makes you feel the heartbreak or the love, right along with the singer. The right song speaks to your soul in a way nothing else can. It's magic. — Cindi Madsen

I'm going for it. Every part of my body says to jump and fly, no matter how hard voices like Shay and my parents try to ground me. I understand their realism, but I don't want to look back and regret not taking the plunge. — Krista Ritchie

Then consider the Middle (and later the New) Comedy and what it aimed at - gradually degenerating into mere realism and empty technique. — Marcus Aurelius

On top of the good was a hideously ugly bronze statue in the modern style. The statue was of a couple, dressed in togas, wrapped in an embrace. Cupped in their hands was a piece of fruit. I couldn't be sure, because realism did not appear to be the artist's specialty, but it looked to me like a pomegranate.
"Good God," Frank, who'd trailed after us, said when he saw the statue. "Rector's even sicker than any of us thought. I've never wished I was blind before, like Graves, but I do now, because then I'd never have to look at that again."
"Frank," John said, his gaze on my face. "Be quiet."
"But what do they do in here?" Frank wanted to know. "Have picnics with their dead relatives and admire their ugly art? — Meg Cabot

What you must do," she continued, "you will. Your mission will be as clear to you and as demanding as your heartbeat. Everything else is just a waste of your time. — Stephen Whitfield

At twenty-one, Richard Wright was not the world-famous author he would eventually be. But poor and black, he decided he would read and no one could stop him. Did he storm the library and make a scene? No, not in the Jim Crow South he didn't. Instead, he forged a note that said, "Dear Madam: Will you please let this nigger boy have some books by HL Mencken?" (because no one would write that about themselves, right?), and checked them out with a stolen library card, pretending they were for someone else. With the stakes this high, you better be willing to bend the rules or do something desperate or crazy. To thumb your nose at the authorities and say: What? This is not a bridge. I don't know what you're talking about. Or, in some cases, giving the middle finger to the people trying to hold you down and blowing right through their evil, disgusting rules. Pragmatism is not so much realism as flexibility. — Ryan Holiday

He tried to make each painting capture that gently fuzzed qualit the camera gave everything, as if someone had patted away a top layer of clarity and left behind something kinder than the eye alone would see. — Hanya Yanagihara

We want Realism's wealth of experience and Symbolism's depth of feeling. All art is a problem of balance between two opposites. — Cesare Pavese

Opinions are like assholes, everybody's got one and everyone thinks everyone else's stinks. — Simone Elkeles

As a matter of fact, no one is more tiresome than the person who can understand only realism in art. It shows a rather low artistic mentality never to believe anything you see unless it appears to be real. One must be willing to allow that symbolic things also mirror realities and sometimes provide greater esthetic pleasure than the merely realistic. — Aaron Copland

True realism lies in the search for the expression of forms faithful to their content. But there is no content detached from human interest. — Asger Jorn

You are to draw not reality, but the appearance of reality! — William Morris Hunt

But no matte what kind of an understanding is adopted, whether associated with positivism, which asserts that the truth can only be reached by trial and error, or rationalism, which asserts that everything can be explained and grasped by reason, whether the perspective of romanticism, which overemphasizes imagination and sensitivity, or an approach based on ardent naturalism, whether based on realism, which aims to describe everything as it is including its shortcomings, or a curiosity-raising approach such as surrealism, whether idealism, which asserts that there is nothing real but ideas, or cubism, which asserts that there is nothing real but instead of direct description, or some other such current or perspective, that is not true poetry. — M. Fethullah Gulen

We prayed the moon would unstopper long enough to suck us through to the other side so we could see how dull the stars were at their backsides. — Lindsay Hunter

Agential realism is not a manifesto, it does not take for granted that all is or will or can be made manifest. On the contrary, it is a call, a plea, a provocation, a cry, a passionate yearning for an appreciation of, attention to the tissue of ethicality that runs through the world. — Karen Barad

The Situational Character: A Critical Realist Perspective on the Human Animal" by Jon D. Hanson and David G. Yosifon, along with its companion piece, "The Situation: An Introduction to the Situational Character, Critical Realism, Power Economics, and Deep Capture." Situationism — Charles Eisenstein

She kissed him first, and all the rest followed. — Alice Hoffman

It's like I am inside this ethereal sphere wherein exists no logic, no reasoning, no typicality, no explanations, no realism, no comparisons, nothing ordinary, and no normalcy. And then if you are to understand me, you have to step into my realm and leave all of those things behind. I'm not typical. I'm not ordinary. And I'm not normal. And I never will be . So I don't see the point of waking up in the morning and wishing to be so. — C. JoyBell C.

Forthwith I crush this acid lemon
Freeing myself of the malefic venom
Hither I let thee rotten
Let my curse be forgotten. — Camilla Isley

Painting is the representation of visible forms. The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal. — Gustave Courbet

Some people are optimists. Some people are pessimists. I'm just a realist who believes that some things are worth fighting for. — C. JoyBell C.

I originally came from Dresden, where Socialist Realism prevailed. Konrad Lueg and I came up with it, for the most part ironically, since I now live in capitalism. It was certainly 'realism', but in another form - the capitalist form, as it were. It wasn't meant that seriously. It was more a slogan for that particular Happening at a furniture store. — Gerhard Richter

Marx is only anti-capitalist
in so far as capitalism is out of date. Another order must be established which will demand, in the name of
history, a new conformity. As for the means, they are the same for Marx as for Maistre: political realism,
discipline, force. — Albert Camus

Someone said to me once that a cigarette at the right moment is better than all the ideals in the world. — Erich Maria Remarque

Realism is condemned by those artists whose poverty of technique does not permit them to express it. — Walter J. Phillips

India went through a dramatic revolution after the '90s when our economy started opening up for the first time and Indians were now experiencing the Western life, if you will. Drugs and sex and a lot of those influences came in as the economy stabilized, and we were growing up and experiencing that. The Indian writing market was very small at that time. Our literature was very attuned to what Western audiences were interested in, so everybody was writing about the slums in India and magic realism or stories about Hindus and Muslims and partition. — Karan Bajaj

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. — Oscar Wilde

But why are you giving this to me if you don't believe?"

"Because I know that you do. — Adria J. Cimino

The Greeks not only face facts. They have no desire to escape from them. — Edith Hamilton

If we have a very big problem to deal with, it is the problem of realism, because we are weaker than our emotions. — Aihebholo-oria Okonoboh

To the other. It is the realism needed to manage the inevitable. A model of living that has broadly worked well in the West is spreading, adapting to local conditions as it goes. We should all look forward to the time when Chinese and Indian teenagers write sulky songs about the appalling dullness of suburbia. — Anonymous

Faith in life, in oneself, in others must be built on the hard rock of realism; that is to say, on the capacity to see evil where it is, to see swindle, destructiveness, and selfishness not only when they are obvious but in their many disguises and rationalizations. Indeed, faith, love, and hope must go together with such a passion for seeing reality in all its nakedness that the outsider would be prone to call the attitude 'cynicism.' And cynical it is, when we mean by it the refusal to be taken in by the sweet and plausible lies that cover almost everything that is said and believed. But this kind of cynicism is not cynicism; it is uncompromisingly critical, a refusal to play the game in a system of deception. — Erich Fromm

I've always wanted to do pieces that have an integral sense of realism and aren't just there for titillation. — Tom Weston-Jones

Since all these novelists [the realists] happened to be men, the present writer, proposing at this moment to write a novel and looking round for a contemporary pattern, was faced with the choice between following one of her regiments and attempting to produce a feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism. — Dorothy M. Richardson

There is no point in being realistic about here and now, no use at all not any, and so it is not the nineteenth but the twentieth century, there is no realism now, life is not real it is not earnest, it is strange which is an entirely different matter. — Gertrude Stein

Chocolate is a kitchen witch's secret weapon. It makes friends easily, soothes troubled spirits, and is conducive to romance. When nothing else works, go with chocolate.
- Sadie Trevalyn's Book of Kitchen Witchery — Alyssa Goodnight

The realism frightens me more than the bubble gum-y, heightened stuff. — Chloe Sevigny

It is not miracles that dispose realists to belief. The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact. Even if he admits it, he admits it as a fact of nature till then unrecognized by him. Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith. If the realist once believes, then he is bound by his very realism to admit the miraculous also. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

What if good institutions were in fact the product of good intentions? What if the cynicism that is supposed to be rigor and the acquisitiveness that is supposed to be realism are making us forget the origins of the greatness we lay claim to - power and wealth as secondary consequences of the progress of freedom, or, as Whitman would prefer, Democracy? — Marilynne Robinson

[A] resistance that dispenses with consolations is always stronger than one which relies on them. — Perry Anderson

When James Cameron brought me the script, which I developed with both Cameron and Jay Cocks, I wanted to make it a thriller, an action film, but with a conscience, and I found that it had elements of social realism. — Kathryn Bigelow

I don't think that I would ever, while writing, think to myself, "I need a little more psychological realism." — Curtis Sittenfeld

Realism is something we practice when we aren't feeling very well. When we don't feel up to the extra effort. — Robert Edmond Jones

Ours is thus a realism of lush and leafy spaces rather than deserts, with science regularly revealing new thickets of canopy. Anyone is welcome to go on sharing Quine's aesthetic appreciation of deserts, but we think the facts now suggest that we must reconcile ourselves to life in the rainforest. — Anonymous

A lack of realism in the vision today costs credibility tomorrow. — John C. Maxwell

This business about graceful exit just simply has no realism to it at all. — George W. Bush

If all goes well, we will be back in time for a proper memorial service [for your father], Ben. I promise."

Ben looked up, and all the bitterness was gone from his eyes, replaced somehow by both resignation and determination.

"And if all doesn't go well?" he asked, tightening his grip on Coralee's trusting hand as he led her outside to the driveway.

Kira's flawless features morphed into something like a smile, yet wholly without happiness or humor.

"Then you'll all be meeting up with [your father] soon enough, I expect. Either that, or you shall wish it was so. — Caitlin Rush

What a pity it is that by such superfluous unrealities he should furnish the public with excuses to evade the overwhelming realism of his moral theology! — Jocelyn Gibb

In creating the Harry Potter artwork, I try to bring a certain amount of realism and believability to the characters and setting, but still add an element of wonder and the unknown. — Mary Grandpre

So many people mean nothing to us, we pass one another by without acknowledgement, without comprehending the gifts many have to offer, if only we slowed down and realised we're not all so different. My front door isn't open to everyone, but I can tell a good one when I see them just like I know trouble when it's staring me in the face. — Tami Egonu