Jules Feiffer Quotes

Sometimes my art is just an illusion - or is it?

Lying and art are very allied. But after you lie, you get to the truth.

You can be very honest without telling the truth, at least in art.

You know what ART stands for? Above Real Truth.

I did best when I had least truth for my subjects.

One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.

In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.

Films are always a fiction, not documentary. Even a documentary is a kind of fiction.

I'm not big into images. I'm into reality.

Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world.

If you're not trying to be real, you don't have to get it right. That's art.

This is why fiction is an art, and life is not - how much more affecting is the lie than the truth.

Truth maybe stranger than fiction, but fiction is truer.

You are to draw not reality, but the appearance of reality!

I could never put anything into a picture that wasn't actually there in front of me. That would be a pointless lie, a mere bit of artfulness.

Realism is a corruption of reality.

Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

As writers, it is our job not only to imagine, but to witness.

In art, anything goes, and if it goes, it goes.

The words are ludicrous at times, but you add the reality to it and that gives it the balance it has.

Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.

There's a bit of truth in everything I do, you know.

I ask questions. I watch the world. And what I have discovered is that the parts of my fiction that people most tell me are 'unbelievable' are those that are most closely based on the real, those least diluted by my imagination.

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.