Robin Hobb Quotes

The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.

Dialogue must appear realistic without being so. Actual realism-the lifting, as it were, of passages from a stenographer's take-down of a 'real life' conversation-would be disruptive. Of what? Of the illusion of the novel. In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.

The challenge is to write about real things magically.

I wish my life was a John Grisham novel. His heroes always seem to be one step away from death but come up with a brilliant plan. Unfortunately, real life can’t be wrapped up with a nice little bow

Real life isn't required to be logical, but fiction has to make sense.

Clean, quick, and easy as lying. We know how it ends practically before it starts. That's why stories appeal to us. They give is the clarity and simplicity our real lives lack.

Real life is not like a movie. Even the best movies, the most rich, fleshed-out movies are not as rich and nuanced as detailed as real life or an actual human being.

You try to make characters you care about, and I think realism helps. Even though this is a high concept, the characters have got to be real.

The telling of a good story, especially one that is real and true, is always exciting.

I think I have learned to really get out of the mathematical side of myself that looks at story and story structure and go with, "Okay, well, what would people do in real life?"

I'm always cribbing from real life. I'm not a very creative filmmaker.

[I]nstead of the usual "Why can't we make movies more like real life?" I think a more pertinent question is "Why can't real life be more like the movies?"

There are characters in some short stories who exist as people, and there are other characters in different short stories who exist as purely literary constructs. You know, the young man in "Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire" - I probably got that right - is a literary construct, and enjoys being a literary construct. He has no life off stage, whereas the young men in "How to Talk to Girls at Parties" were as near to being real human beings as I could possibly get them.

One of the things that makes characters real is details. Life offers a lot of details. You just have to choose and use them wisely. When you give them to fictional people and a fictional story, their purpose and their meaning changes, so it's best to see the version in the book as fiction entirely, wherever it started out.

Real life isn't a series of interconnected events occurring one after another - like beads strung on a necklace. Life is actually a series of encounters in which one event may change those that follow in a wholly unpredictable, even devastating way.

The beauty of the world of Unbreakable is that you're playing it for reality. It should never feel like a comic book movie. It feels like a straight-up drama. It's real. You're confronting the possibility that comic book characters were based on people that were real.

The films I do always have a happy ending. I hope it reflects back to real life.

As regards plot I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots. And as I think a plot desirable and almost necessary, I have this extra grudge against life.

Real life seems to have no plots.

I am a director and I think actually they're not that different - dramas and docs aren't that different. When I'm doing a drama I'm trying to make things feel as believable and real as possible. The hair, the make-up, the costume, the design, you're trying to make it authentic. And when you've got a documentary it's all authentic, so what story are you going to tell and how do you make it dramatic and exciting? It's the same thing.

And that's the way of a real tale. Take any one that you're fond of. You may know, or guess, what kind of a tale it is, happy-ending or sad-ending, but the people in it don't know. And you don't want them to.

Life is not a PG feel-good movie. Real life often ends badly. Literature tries to document this reality, while showing us it is still possible for us to endure nobly.

Life is lived in real places, and I shoot in real places.

I belong to an ancient, idle, wild and useless tribe, perhaps I am even one of the last members of it, who for many thousands of years, in all countries and parts of the world, has, now and again, stayed for a time among the hard-working honest people in real life, and sometimes has thus been fortunate enough to create another sort of reality for them, which in some way or another, has satisfied them. I am a storyteller.

You can write a whole fiction, and you're talking to people who have gone through that, in real life. But the truth of it is that when you're talking to those people, you don't care about your movie anymore. You just want to hear about what they have gone through. You want all of the details. It's amazing.