Nicole Krauss Quotes

If the audience sees and feels things are real, then they buy it.

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

The highest praise is when a kid says, 'This book feels so real; this could have happened at my school.'

I do crazy amounts of research. I want this stuff to 'work,' so to speak. I need to be, at least to me, believable - because if I feel - if I cannot invest some element of verisimilitude, the reader is absolutely not going to buy in.

Everything in a story should be credible.

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.

I want my fiction to seem real.

There was no difference between my characters and the life my readers were going to have to face.

Even in the realest American cinema that I see, there's still not that sense that this is reality. There's still that sense that you are watching a movie. And hopefully, if we did get our jobs right, that sense disappears when you watch this movie.

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.

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.

You have to believe that you are the character or the thing or whatever the hell you're playing.

Acting is trying to be absolutely truthful; to get audiences to believe that you are a dean, when, actually, not only are you not the dean, but if you walked into the building they'd probably throw you out. That's very hard.

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.

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

I get very involved in my roles. I want people to think it's all really happening. If I'm in it, I'm in it.

I think the best way to sell a made-up character is to plant his feet into the real earth.

I try to bring myself to every role. The last thing you want to seem like to other people is a talking head or an actor reading lines.

The only way to make a scene realistic is to do it the way you know it would really happen.

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

I've been in so many writing workshops where someone hands in a story, and when the other writers in the workshop are giving feedback, they say, 'This is unbelievable.' And the writer says, 'Well, actually, the events are based in real life. This actually happened.'

When I'm doing a role the one thing I ask is 'Is this believable? am I being truthful?'

Good cinema is what we can believe and bad cinema is what we can't believe. What you see and believe in is very much what I'm interested in.

Real life doesn't have to be convincing, but fiction does.

If it's fiction, then it better be true.