Those novels with old-fashioned heroes and heroines in them — are ruinous!

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

She could just pack up and leave, but she does not visualize what’s beyond ahead.

There are always loose ends in real life.

Mothers do not have love affairs. Before their children they have dreams, and after their children they have delusions. If the father is involved somewhere, they have fantasies.

La vie ressemble plus souvent à un roman qu’un roman ne ressemble à la vie.”(“Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.”)

There are no pessimists; there are only realists and liars.

We want to believe that this life is longer than it is, but in the grand scheme of the universe our existence equals the amount of time it takes a warm breeze to blow through...

A substantial amount of research over the past decade has reinforced the idea that although internal happiness can deviate from its “resting state” in reaction to life events, it usually returns toward its baseline over...

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.

I’ll tell you what I want. Magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misinterpret things to them. I don’t tell the truth. I tell what ought to be truth. And...

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...

Think I’ll miss you forever,Like the stars miss the sun in the morning sky.

Life itself has lost its plane reality: it is projected, not along the old fixed points, but along the dynamic coordinates of Einstein, of revolution. In this new projection, the best-known formulas and objects become...

On avoiding the darker side of life in educational literature for children: “There is something ludicrous in the idea of so educating a generation which is born to the atomic bomb. Since it is likely...

. . . Absurdism was really just realism seen from close to the bottom.

How should I know?”… I am not dismayed by ultimate mysteries… I can no more grasp what is behind such questions as my cat can understand what is behind the clatter I make while I...

You’d like Freedom, Truth, and Justice, wouldn’t you, Comrade Sergeant?’ said Reg encouragingly.’I’d like a hard-boiled egg,’ said Vimes, shaking the match out.There was some nervous laughter, but Reg looked offended.’In the circumstances, Sergeant, I...

Of course, that’s one of the dreams of modernist literature, whether realist or fantastic: that the more stories we tell each other about such tragedies, the fewer of them there will be. We’re still waiting...

Reality hasn’t really sunk in yet, I knew that. I didn’t want to know what life was going to feel like when it finally did.

[A] resistance that dispenses with consolations is always stronger than one which relies on them.

I craved a form of naive realism. I paid special attention, I craned my readerly neck whenever a London street I knew was mentioned, or a style of frock, a real public person, even a...

I wish to confound all these people, to create a work of art of a supernatural realism and of a spiritualist naturalism. I wish to prove… that nothing is explained in the mysteries which surround...

Madness is loving the unsolvable puzzle of your soul and replacing the lost pieces with my own.

No ghosts need apply. – Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire

Saddam’s politics was the politics of the thug, of violence from the outset of his reign. Realism suggests that some people are not going to be tractable in response to purely peaceable overtures. Indeed, it...

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.

Only people with full stomachs become environmentalists.

There was a lot about my life that was crappy, now that I couldn’t talk. But if I hadn’t gotten drunk that night, if I hadn’t gotten in that accident, would I have ever had...

Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself.She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance.

The threats that resurfaced in the past 10 years were not an aberration. Al Qaeda and terrorism or one such threat, but it was actually not the most serious threat that the United States faced....

One of the most brilliant Russian writers of the twentieth century, Yevgeny Zamyatin belongs to the tradition in Russian literature represented by Gogol, Leskov, Bely, Remizov, and, in certain aspects of their work, also by...

Who gets to be the judge of reality? If it was deeply felt, believed, spoken about often or altered your life course, then it was real enough. Faith doesn’t get the luxury of all those...

escapist” literature. As I understand it, the adjective implies, a little condescendingly, that the life therein depicted cannot be identified with the real life which the critic knows so well in W.C.1: and may even...

A crude age. Peace is stabilized with cannon and bombers, humanity with concentration camps and pogroms. We’re living in a time when all standards are turned upside-down, Kern. Today the aggressor is the shepherd of...

Did it ever occur to you that when he told you he would come back he was lying? Many a man has done it. He probably meant no malice – he just did not want...

Aren’t 3,000 lives worth a miracle to a good and all-powerful god?

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.