Gregory Benford Quotes

I have realised just how important it is to readers to feel that fictional stories are based on reality.

Most cop movies and TV shows are fantasies.

Wambaugh's naturalistic portrait of the cop world turned 'Centurions' and 'The Blue Knight' (1972) into bestsellers, but his next two books made him relevant to a larger audience and to the next generation of crime writers.

'Vice Squad' needed to be real if it was going to have the impact that I wanted it to have.

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.

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

For me, the comedies that truly work are the ones that are grounded in some way. If it's all heightened, it's really hard. It's a little slippery. It's hard to get purchase on the side of the wall.

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

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

For me, crime fiction was an opportunity to sneak up on readers with social issues, something they won't go out of their way to seek.

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

I learned to write crime novels by reading people I hoped to emulate: people like James Lee Burke, Lawrence Block, Joseph Wambaugh, and Sue Grafton.

I don't like something so fantasy-filled that I couldn't imagine it ever happening. I like things that could come true. That's how I conduct the show.

Good crime writing holds up a mirror to the readers and reflects in a darker light the world in which they live.

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

You never want to just be outrageous for outrageous' sake 'cause then it doesn't work, and it's not believable. You want to be as true to whatever character you're playing.

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.'

Sometimes in entertainment, when people have done the Academy Awards - like, for example, in 'The Bodyguard' - I just didn't believe it; it didn't feel authentic.

Why do a reality show if you're going to be fake?

Acting means nothing unless it's truth. And honesty.

Although I would like the negative balanced with the positive, what really bothers me is if it's not real. You can add humanity to what might look like a negative role.

The police who did our training said 'Happy Valley' is one of the only police programmes they can watch and not burst out laughing, saying, 'As if you'd do that.' They think it's really authentic.

The American writer has his hands full, trying to understand and then describe and then make credible much of American reality.

I like everything to be natural... believable.

I want to be taken seriously: I can cook, I do have qualifications, OK, I do make mistakes, but I want to show that on camera. I'm not perfect. I'm someone who works hard, who is serious about what they're doing. It's substance over style.