Suspend Disbelief Quotes & Sayings

It wasn't just about doing tricks. It's about taking an audience to another place, a special place, so they can really suspend their disbelief. Its about amazing the audience as well as moving them. — David Copperfield

There's something really powerful about groups and shared experiences. People might be skeptical about their ability to change if they're by themselves, but a group will convince them to suspend disbelief. A community creates belief. — Charles Duhigg

I say to my congregants, If you believe in God, the best thing you can do for yourself is to suspend your belief for a while, because undoubtedly your God is too small and you must grow beyond that God. On the other hand, if you don't believe in God, your very disbelief is a stumbling block. Kick it away and place your faith in somehting more ennobling than disbelief. Take a flier. Expand your purview. Take a leap of faith. — Forrest Church

As a child, I was just never that interested in the lives of my favourite actors, like Cary Grant. I do wonder whether knowing too much about someone's personal life interrupts an audience's ability to suspend disbelief, to really invest in the characters. My preference would always be that people engage with the work. — Chiwetel Ejiofor

I like movies! No, I like theater too. And paintings are great, and all of that! But to me, the great sort of artistic medium I think, of our time, is film. I really feel that. I mean to me, there's nothing else out there, where I can sort of suspend disbelief for two hours. — Leonardo DiCaprio

Suspend for a moment your disbelief and encounter once again the sense of wonder you knew when there was ... magic! — Andrew Lord

With theatre, we all agree to suspend our disbelief about so many things, but not about race. It's totally OK to have one actor playing five roles - people are willing to believe that. But they won't believe it if there's a black or an Asian kid who has white parents. What does that say about us? — David Henry Hwang

I just invited close friends and family, the usual suspects whose opinion I value but who I know will enjoy the film [ Before I Go To Sleep]. I don't know how difficult it is for them to suspend their disbelief because they obviously know me and what they're seeing is not me. — Mark Strong

You can't really do a big character in an action film; you're already suspending your disbelief in the action, then to suspend your disbelief in the character is too much. — Adam McKay

I always like to have faith that an audience will suspend their disbelief, if you present it to them in the right way. I find it peculiar when people scoff at one bold idea, and yet they'll then turn over and watch a man travel through time in a police phone box. I think it's just how you present the idea. — Tom Mison

When it comes to acting, people talk about the suspension of disbelief that you ask of the audience. Before that starts, you have to, as an actor, suspend your own disbelief. — Helena Bonham Carter

In listening to stories we tend to suspend disbelief in order to be entertained, whereas in evaluating statistics we generally have an opposite inclination to suspend belief in order not to be beguiled. — John Allen Paulos

I have always thought a person needs to constantly refine the capacity to suspend disbelief in order to keep emotions organized and not suffer debilitating confusion, and I mean just toward the things of daily life. I suppose this admits to a desperate sort of pragmatism. Still, it works for me. What human heart isn't in extremis? — Howard Norman

Palin, Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and others have made an art form of convincing far too many Americans to suspend their disbelief, and they have severely damaged the ability of our country to have serious discussions about serious challenges. — John Yarmuth

You have to suspend disbelief a little bit to buy into your situation and to the story and to how the character will react. You have to tweak your credibility a little bit, is basically what it comes down to. — Richard Dean Anderson

The more people know about you, the more face-time you get in the media, the harder your job becomes to create a character in whom people suspend disbelief. — Vera Farmiga

To engage with art, we have to be willing to be wrong, venture outside our psychic comfort zones, suspend disbelief, and remember that art explores and alters consciousness simultaneously. — Jerry Saltz

Doubt is a first cousin to faith, Ghosh. To have faith, you have to suspend your disbelief. — Abraham Verghese

The Skinny Woman Who Is Beautiful and Toned but Also Gluttonous and Disgusting
Again, I am more than willing to suspend my disbelief for good set decoration alone. One pristine kitchen from a Nancy Meyers movie like "It's Complicated" compensates for five scenes of Diane Keaton being caught half naked in a topiary. But I can't suspend disbelief enough, for instance, if the gorgeous and skinny heroine is also a ravenous pig when it comes to food. And everyone in the movie - her parents, her friends, her boss - are all complicit in this huge lie. They constantly tell her to stop eating. And this actress, this poor skinny actress who obviously lost weight to play the likable lead character, has to say things like "Shut up, you guys! I love cheesecake! If I want to eat an entire cheesecake, I will!" If you look closely, you can see this woman's ribs through the dress she's wearing - that's how skinny she is, this cheesecake-loving cow. — Mindy Kaling

Storylines from fiction always seem inherently improbable to occur in real life, yet when we read them we are happy to suspend our disbelief, which may simply suggest that in our everyday lives we have an irrational craving for certainty and probability. — Guy Fraser-Sampson

I like using animals because they help suspend my reader's disbelief. We have certain ideas about dentists. We don't have many ideas about rhinoceros dentists. — Yann Martel

Whenever you're writing a book or creating a movie or a game, your first task is to get the reader/audience/player to suspend disbelief, to buy into the logic and boundaries of your world, even though those boundaries might include things like dragons and magic. To do that, you need long threads - of history and culture. — R.A. Salvatore

I'm a great audience. I cry very easily. I suspend disbelief in two seconds. — Stephen Sondheim

It never ceases to amaze me that readers who are willing to suspend their disbelief when it comes to the motivation of a vicious serial killer get high and mighty because I have put a coffee shop where there isn't one. Er ... it's a novel. I made one up. I'm allowed to make stuff up. I'd go as far as to suggest that I make stuff up for a living. — Mark Billingham

Visual and performing artists produce art that lives in the present world. The art of the writer exists in another dimension. Through strings of words and phrases writers inspire their readers to imagine, to conjure images, to suspend disbelief, to enter a world visible only in their minds. It is in that unseen world where the art of the writer lives. — Mindie Burgoyne

No one thinks Las Vegas is real; it is illusion, but visitors willingly suspend disbelief and pretend. — Hal Rothman

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

You aren't allowed back until you've learned to willingly suspend disbelief. — Rebecca Murphy

What if you began to expect the best from any situation? Isn't it possible that you could write new chapters in your life with happy endings? Suspend your disbelief? Take a leap of faith? After all, what have you got to lose but misery and lack? — Sarah Ban Breathnach

try to explain to her she's dead and therefore has no further need for Romeo's impressive erection, but she's finding it difficult to suspend her disbelief. — Leisa Rayven

When you have a movie about people landing from planet Neptune, you suspend disbelief. I totally get it. But I like doing things that happen in real life. — Will Gluck

In order to have faith, or follow any other organized religion, I'd have to suspend a degree of disbelief. — Pete Townshend

Think about it for a brief moment. Suspend disbelief. Wind the clock forward 100 years. Do you think, as a species, we will still be struggling with the things that vex us today? Will we still be arguing about the same stuff? We will still be eating Cocoa Puffs? We are at the end of the beginning. — Brad Feld

In order to believe clients' accounts of trauma, you need to suspend any pre-conceived notions that you have about what is possible and impossible in human experience. As simple as they may sound, it may be difficult to do so. — Aphrodite Matsakis

I think audiences have hit the wall with CGI and special effects. They have seen so many over-the-top events that they can't suspend disbelief. — Sylvester Stallone

Most of us encounter a great deal more Mystery than we are willing to experience. Sometimes knowing life requires us to suspend disbelief, to recognize that all our hard-won knowledge may only be provisional and the world may be quite different than we believe it to be. This can be very stressful, even frightening. But if we are not willing to wonder, we may have to hang up the phone on life. — Rachel Naomi Remen

The art of movies is to allow the audience to suspend their disbelief. They need to use their imaginations. — William Friedkin

A Piece of writing has to seduce the reader, it has to suspend disbelief and earn the reader's trust — Po Bronson

Theatre's great. It's such an act of faith. It's a wonderful art form where you suspend disbelief for a couple of hours. It's a lovely art form because the actors and the audience are alive and in the room at the same time together. That's why I love the theatre. — Israel Horovitz

There are, after all, atheists who say they wish the fable were true but are unable to suspend the requisite disbelief, or who have relinquished belief only with regret. To this I reply: who wishes that there was a permanent, unalterable celestial despotism that subjected us to continual surveillance and could convict us of thought-crime, and who regarded us as its private property even after we died? How happy we ought to be, at the reflection that there exists not a shred of respectable evidence to support such a horrible hypothesis. — Christopher Hitchens

I enjoy watching people fall in love on-screen so much that I can suspend my disbelief for the contrived situations that only happen in the heightened world of romantic comedies. I have come to enjoy the moment when the normal lead guy, say, slips and falls right on top of the hideously expensive wedding cake. I actually feel robbed when the female lead's dress doesn't get torn open at a baseball game while the JumboTron is on her. — Mindy Kaling

One of the hardest things to believe is that anyone will abandon the effort to escape a charge of murder. It is extremely important to suspend disbelief on that. If you don't, the story is spoiled. — Rex Stout

It's absurd to think of 'Pride and Prejudice,' this classic, beloved book, beset with a zombie uprising. The goal is to make you suspend your disbelief enough to allow you to get lost in the story and believe what you're reading for a while. — Seth Grahame-Smith