Markus Zusak Quotes

To present a whole world that doesn’t exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we’re polymaths. That’s just the act of all good writing.

Sometimes I read a script and it's obvious from early on that it's one where the suspension of disbelief has to develop strongly from page one. Some are more reality-based.

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.

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.

Cinema, which demands suspension of disbelief, is an increasingly naive proposition.

Magic has universal appeal. I don't believe in magic in the way that I describe in my books, but I'd love it to be real.

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

Fiction is truth. I think fiction is the truest thing there ever was. My whole effort is to remove that distinction. The writer is the midwife of understanding. It's very important for me to tell politics like a story, to make it real.

The function of the actor is to make the audience imagine for the moment that real things are happening to real people.

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

I think we need to make documentaries about fantasy and storytelling. I think I just started to scratch the surface of a method that allows us to do that. We want to be sucked into the events, suspend our disbelief and imagine that this is a fiction, but actually putting onscreen the gap between who the people are and who they want to be and therefore opening the question about why they want to be this person.

Everything in a story should be credible.

It's into the same bag as E.T. and Yoda, wherein you're trying to create something that people will actually believe, but it's not so much a symbol of the thing, but you're trying to do the thing itself.

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 exquisite truth is to believe in something that maybe you know is a fiction, but you believe in it willingly.

For a found-footage-style movie, there's a definite advantage in using unknowns, because it helps sell the illusion that it's real. A known actor would get in the way of the suspension of disbelief.

Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction.

The whole film genre is one of deceit. It is the suspension of disbelief. That's what all theater and all film is based on.

Anyone who has set out to invent a purely imaginary story knows that the whole thing is fantasy, from beginning to end; there must be a sense of magic created about the most restrained of naturalism.

All I really want to do is entertain people out there sitting in the dark and for them to believe it.

You read about somebody, and it doesn't really matter whether or not they really exist - the point is that you get into them like real characters.

If you can't believe a little in what you see on the screen, it's not worth wasting your time on cinema.

I once fell 20 feet from a tree, was knocked unconscious, and when I picked myself up and straggled home, my parents thought I was making it up. However, when my brother and I fabricated a story about an encounter with a bear, they believed that! So maybe I learned very early on that fiction was more interesting to listeners!

The more you can create that magic bubble, that suspension of disbelief, for a while, the better.