294 Quotes About Realism

Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more.

It's lies. It's all lies. Some of them are just prettier than others, that's all. People see what they think is there.

People will kill you. Over time. They will shave out every last morsel of fun in you with little, harmless sounding phrases that people uses every day, like: 'Be realistic!'"[What It Is (2009)]

I think of something I read about Sargent: how in portraiture, Sargent always looked for the animal in the sitter (a tendency that, once I knew to look for it, I saw everywhere in his work: in the long foxy noses and pointed ears of Sargent’s heiresses, in his rabbit-toothed intellectuals and leonine captains of industry, his plump, owl-faced children).

There are always loose ends in real life.

The extent of creativity to which I admire in an individual is his ability to be richly creative while still, in a way, telling the truth. It is the fool who creates only his own lies, and the bore who simply repeats what he is told.

Doubt is a question mark; faith is an exclamation point. The most compelling, believable, realistic stories have included them both.

When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that's not familiar. But I'm not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear.

Aggression has no ears.