Art Bell Quotes

Lest men suspect your tale untrue, Keep probability in view.

The only difference between reality and fiction is that fiction needs to be credible.

My action follows my characters. If a character is a cop, you cannot be posing all the time, you cannot fly off the roof because it doesn't make any sense - it's not practical.

Overall, I adhere to the one guiding rule any author writing historical fiction should follow: whatever you describe has to be possible. It may not be common, obvious, or even all that probable, but it absolutely has to be possible.

Trying to ground everything in reality was the most important thing to me.

I don't quite operate within the realist mode. I kind of push the stories out towards the cusp of believability - that's the area of interest for me.

There's no point considering something which is very unrealistic.

Everything that I can do to ground the story in reality helps make it harder for people to be dismissive of it.

VERISIMILITUDE (the appearance or semblance of truth)

Reality is not always probable, or likely. But if you're writing a story, you have to make it as plausible as you can, because if not, the reader's imagination will reject it.

Among its many other obligations, fiction always has to be believable. Life does not have to suffer such constraint, and much of what takes place is believable only because it happens.

I'm not interested in an imaginary world.

Everything in a story should be credible.

Long ago, I became more interested in the real world than in make-believe.

I want to make the world real. I have to be able to believe that it could happen. I can't put Pegasus in my stories because horses can't fly. It's just a quirk in my brain.

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.

I'm writing about real things. Real people. Real characters. You have to believe what I write about is true or you wouldn't pay any attention at all. Sometimes it's me, or a composite of me and other people. Sometimes it's not me at all.

The best movies are rooted in reality.

You have an audience that is fairly well grounded in the real world. You serve them and yourself best by making everything as real as possible.

Truth is what works.

The script is very good because the things that happen in it are very believable to me. It doesn't presuppose that the world has changed very much. You don't have to think that you're in a different world.

When you have a movie about people landing from planet Neptune, you suspend disbelief. I totally get it. But I like doing things that happen in real life.

When I write for kids, I have to make sure they know what can't happen. They have to know it's a fantasy. But when I write for adults, they have to think it's real. Every detail has to be real or they won't buy it.

Encouraging people to believe in it was the most important thing of all. It's one of the reasons I was always uncomfortable whenever film crews came on the set to shoot things. I didn't want our make-believe to be exposed.

Verisimilitude is something I am constantly seeking in fiction. I am looking for surface detail that makes something seem real.