294 Quotes About Realism

Here's the most startling irony I know in film history: Antonioni, who is often denigrated by left-wing critics as a formalist and aesthete gives us radical realism through the long take, and what he gives us--this is his metaphysical wager--is real outside the film, off the set, beyond the camera and underneath the surface of everyday life.

He is capable of turning everything into anything--snow into skin, skin into blossoms, blossoms into sugar, sugar into powder, and powder back into little drifts of snow--for all that matters to him, apparently, is to make things into what they are not, which is doubtless proof that he cannot stand being anywhere for long, wherever he happens to be.

Any power that doesn’t give you benefit is not a power.

You're an idealist. The idealists are always the revolutionaries, the cat's paws. Then the realists consolidate, compromise and liquidate the opposition.

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.

Push the needle into some middle range of guarded optimism.

You could believe you were living virtuously and also murder people if you were a fanatic. Fanatics thought that murdering people was virtuous, or murdering certain people.

In power, it is realism. - There are many quests at every Mass. (Au pouvoir, c'est le réalisme. - Il y a bien des quêtes à chaque messe.)

A lot of people, especially this one psychoanalyst guy they have here, keeps asking me if I'm going apply myself when I go back to school next September. It's such a stupid question, in my opinion. I mean how do you know what you're going to do till you do it? The answer is, you don't. I think I am, but how do I know? I swear it's a stupid question.