REALISM QUOTES
quotations about realism
We live in a nightmare of falsehoods, and there are few who are sufficiently awake and aware to see things as they are. Our first duty is to clear away illusions and recover a sense of reality.
NIKOLAI BERDYAEV
"Political Testament", World Review, March 1949
Reality itself is too obvious to be true.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
The Perfect Crime
I am of two minds; realism is challenging and wonderful, but I get lost in abstracts; they just take me to another place and time.
RITA POORE
Cape Gazette, February 4, 2016
I don't want realism. I want magic!
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
A Streetcar Named Desire
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.
MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ
H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life
But realism in art can only be achieved in one way--through artifice.
ANDRÉ BAZIN
What Is Cinema?
Nothing is more real than nothing.
SAMUEL BECKETT
Malone Dies
Realism is often mistakenly identified with the view that there is some special discipline which has privileged access to the real.
DAVID K. CLARK
Empirical Realism: Meaning and the Generative Foundation of Morality
It is a slice of life, a realistic play. If it can be criticised for being commonplace, it can certainly not be condemned for being untrue to life. So you will see mushrooms sprouting on the stage, which is incontrovertible proof not only that these mushrooms are real mushrooms, but that they are normal mushrooms too.
EUGENE IONESCO
Notes and Counter Notes
A realist is a man who knows both the world and his own dreams.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Word for World is Forest
Realism is simply Romanticism that has lost its reason ... that is its reason for existing.
G. K. CHESTERTON
Alarms and Discursions
My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
attributed, A Sentimental Education: The Story of a Young Man
People will kill you over time, and how they'll kill you is with tiny, harmless phrases, like "be realistic."
DYLAN MORAN
attributed, The Actor's Business Plan
Reading the morning newspaper is the realist's morning prayer.
GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL
Miscellaneous Writings of G. W. F. Hegel
Realism ... falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.
EUGENE IONESCO
The Tulane Drama Review, 1959
Realism can break a writer's heart.
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Shame
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.
ANAÏS NIN
Henry and June
Realism, n. The art of depicting nature as it is seen by toads. The charm suffusing a landscape painted by a mole, or a story written by a measuring-worm.
AMBROSE BIERCE
The Devil's Dictionary
Realism is the regional ontology of science. It is the natural worldview of scientists who observe the world and what happens in it. But here comes the rub: realists and scientists see what they see, but cannot see what they cannot see.... Like everybody else, realists and scientists also have a blind spot in their field of vision. This blind spot is a condition of the possibility of seeing.
FREDERIC VANDENBERGHE
introduction, What's Critical About Critical Realism?: Essays in Reconstructive Social Theory
I would rather create something that does not exist than pay homage to all the constraints of time, place, moment and specificity that realism dictates.
LYNDA LEHMANN
attributed, Art Quotes