I lay there for three whole days, totally paralyzed. My friends helped me to the bathroom and anywhere else I needed to move; but I have very vague impressions of those days because it was...

The public is always relieved to find that once the chief officers of state are elected they do not sincerely want change.

I have always thought that foreign-policy idealism has to be tempered with realism.

To put it crudely but graphically, the monkey who did not have a realistic perception of the tree branch he jumped for was soon a dead monkey—and therefore did not become one of our ancestors.

Life is like a story, when all the resolution is resolved, you heave a sigh of relief.

Your strength will be found when you stop struggling with yourself, instead of thinking everyone is a struggle worth overcoming. Every obstacle in life is a lesson that teaches us, not others.

Sometimes it’s best to trade an ideal for something more practical that you can guarantee.

Today the aggressor is the shepherd of peace, and the beaten and hunted are the troublemakers of the world. What’s more, there are whole races who believe it!

Again, we may decry the color-prejudice of the South, yet it remains a heavy fact. Such curious kinks of the human mind exist and must be reckoned with soberly. They cannot be laughed away, nor...

The making of miracles to edification was as ardently admired by pious Victorians as it was sternly discouraged by Jesus of Nazareth. Not that the Victorians were unique in this respect. Modern writers also indulge...

And you’d be left there like a fucking dumpling. You’d be standing there. A fucking dumpling man I’m telling ye.

Most people are optimists, although they may claim they are not. People who call themselves realists are often the biggest optimists of all.

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....

Surrealism, then, neither aims to subvert realism, as does the fantastic, nor does it try to transcend it. It looks for different means by which to explore reality itself.

The fault in our stars is the inability to see that the world falls in love with fantasy, fairytales and magic in movies. Even religion asks us to believe in the most unlikely of situations....

Don’t let realism keep you from doing what you feel you need to do, even if you think it’s hopeless.

It’s not much. You begin by thinking there is something extraordinary about it. But you’ll find out, when you’ve been out in the world a while longer, unhappiness is the commonest thing there is.

You’ll see some bad things, but if you didn’t see them, they’d still be happening.

I am not an angel,’ I asserted; ‘and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself. Mr. Rochester, you must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me – for you...

If you see yourself as a man, no one will dare to see you as a kid.

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...

Call me Bitter Otter. It’s just a nickname I gave myself. However, a better descriptive and more realistic name for myself would be Tangy Walrus.

suspension of disbelief’, that beloved criterion of positivist criticism supposedly serving to establish the legitimacy of the fantastic, confirms this hegemony.

The one thing is fiction in a novel and the other thing is reality. With fiction you don’t make a fuss – you can ‘beat it’ and there’s never enough. At least in my opinion...

When you feel hatred towards your life, hate it. See how it will actually do something to your life.

A man can gasp out his life beside you-and you feel none of it. Pity, Sympathy, sure-but you don’t feel the pain. Your belly is whole and that’s what counts. A half-yard away someone’s world...

The flimsy little protestations that mark the front gate of every novel, the solemn statements that any resemblance to real persons living or dead is entirely coincidental, are fraudulent every time. A writer has no...

I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.

Realism arises from the maturity of the minds, while Idealism arises from their conformity.

When you make a film, if you are an insider, you’re usually the last person to know that your film is not right. But when you are an outsider, you have a little more objectivity.I...

Be not who you’re not

Moral writing is boring.

Realism can break a writer’s heart.

to ask them to legalize pot is something like asking them to put butter on the handcuffs before they place them on you, something else is hurting you – that’s why you need pot or...

The nature of things is, I admit, a sturdy adversary.

…that realisation that I was the oddity, the statistical probability, life was predictable.

I am not an angel,” I asserted; “and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself.

Enttäuschung und Frustration werden […] alle erleben, die sich wie im Märchen danach sehnen, Glück in einem Schlaraffenland zu finden … Nur, dass unser Schlaraffenland nicht ein großer Berg von süßem Brei ist … wir...

Science Fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this...

Valuing names as they do, Realists are sparing with them. They are likely to be known only as Joe or Bill or Plato. And they don’t smile much. Nominalists have more fun. They are known...

(…) Qual sera o destino de Helène? O meu, certamente. Que meios têm as mães de assegurar às suas filhas que o homem ao qual elas serão entregues será o esposo de seus corações? As...

Optimism was for children. Once you reached adulthood then you had to join the rest of the world as a realist – life was a bag of shit you were expected to pay for.

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...

Hell, I’d even failed with women. Three wives. Nothing really wrong each time. It all got destroyed by petty bickering. Railing about nothing. Getting pissed-off over anything and everything. Day by day, year by year,...

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...

The truth ain’t pretty. That’s how you can identify it.

I am often guilty of expecting the worst so as to avoid disappointment and welcome surprise.

Who’s crazy: people who trust other people, or people who don’t?

On the morning appointed for her departure Tess awoke before dawn — at the marginal minute of the dark when the grove is still mute save for one prophetic bird, who sings with a clear-voiced...

Every man in the world is either a Realist or a Nominalist. Give yourself a test: if someone called you a gigger or a fell-picker, and you knew it wasn’t true, would you hit him...