Samuel Johnson Quotes

The true impressionism is realism. So many people do not observe.

I try to capture reality, nothing else.

Draw what you see.

Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid.

I don't want to manipulate actuality; I want to record it.

If you never noticed, it never happened.

Henry James claim that if you want to be a novelist you should be somebody on whom nothing is lost.

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.

I wish to reproduce things as they are or as they would be even if I myself did not exist.

I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be.

The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement. The great thing is indeed that the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of the realities, that it also has color and form and character, has often in fact a broad and rich comicality.

All you can write is what you see.

The thing is that when you don't carry a camera, that's when you see pictures in particular, or at least that's when you think you see pictures in particular. When you do carry it, if you do see one on the occasion that you do, you can take it.

The camera photographs what's there.

I'm simply trying to tell the truth about human behaviour as I see it.

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

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

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

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.

Portray the world for what it is, and you will find truth.

All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

Part of the role of photography is to exaggerate, and that is an aspect that I have to puncture. I do that by showing the world as I really find it.

Right from the beginning, I always strived to capture everything I saw as completely as possible.

Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.

Facts are better than dreams.