Ernest Hemingway Quotes

I want to tell stories that are true and that resonate and move people, that highlight both the tremendous beauty and ugliness available in the human experience.

It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author's experience worked out literally.

I prize something that feels authentic. It's an undefinable thing, but I know it when I see it, and I think audiences do, too. One of the reasons why 'Bloody Sunday' and 'United 93' work is because they felt real, felt truthful.

I only understand realism.

You can sustain visual beauty and innovative visual ideas for a certain length of time, but in a two-hour experience, which is really what movies are, usually audiences - whether they know it or not - most want an emotional connection to character.

I film normal-life subjects in natural settings that some people would consider uncinematic. But what I want to show is nature itself, as the truth of life.

Personally, I like films that make me a little bit uncomfortable because I think you're uncomfortable when something is real.

We're all flawed, and we all make mistakes, and we all have weaknesses. And those are the kind of people I want to see onscreen, the ones that feel like real flesh-and-blood human beings and not the weird, whitewashed, Hollywood stand-ins for people with the rough edges sanded off that I can't connect to because they just don't resonate with me.

I think the most useful thing you can do as a writer is to reconstruct real life with all its color, hardship, joy, and intrigue. If you're interested in people, you honor them best, I think, by making the fullest possible picture of them. Your subjects may - and from my experience probably will - protest your portrait of them.

Literature isn't a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts.

Things have to be believable, not in a literal, photographic sense, but in an emotional sense - capturing the essence of the situation.

I go to great lengths to make certain situations feel right to the reader.

No matter how close to personal experience a story might be, inevitably you are going to get to a part that isn't yours and, actually, whether it happened or not becomes irrelevant. It is all about choosing the right words.

I hope that doing truthful portrayals of people in a variety of circumstances gives people a kind of subterranean link to those characters.

I think there is something so compelling about the truth that whether you're a lawyer or judge or an actor, when you get at that truth, it connects with people on a particular level that I think makes your art more viable.

Lyrical poets have to be in touch with visceral experience. I've always tried to avoid virtual experiences. That's emerging in my fiction.

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.

Who would want a face that hasn't seen or lived properly, hasn't got any wrinkles that come with age, experience and laughter? Not me, anyway.

I want to try and portray characters that are in real life, that you see day-to-day. If I were to just stay in my little village in Wales, I would have gotten a very small taste of a very big plate.

Realism hasn't fallen out of favor with most people, who are interested in people's lives rather than gymnastics of style or literary trends. It's a certain kind of academic who undervalues realism, largely because it is not amenable to endless exegesis.

The reason I don't like realist, photorealist, neorealist, or whatever, is that I am as interested in the artificial as I am in the real.

When I saw 'The Player', I came out with knots in my stomach because it was so true to my experience.

The problem with doing [painting] Nixon is that if you make him look nice, he doesn’t look like Nixon anymore.

It's much easier to conjure characters strictly from your imagination than to have to think about whether you're representing people in a truthful way.

I've found you don't have to make anything up. Reality is so complex and fascinating and horrible and beautiful.