Fictional Reality Quotes

'Penny Dreadful' is so realistic. The tonality is so earthy and so real that I actually believe it is in the realm of possibility for all these extra species to exist among us.

The whole point of art, as far as I’m concerned, is that art doesn’t make any difference. And that’s why it’s important. Take film: you can have quite extreme emotional experiences watching a movie, but they stop as soon as you walk out of the cinema. You can see people being hurt, but even though you feel those things strongly, you know they’re not real.

A reader can never tell if it's a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you're reading it, they're the same. It's a thimble. It's in the book.

I read autobiographies because there is too much fiction in my life.

Man has always sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort and advantage. He lives not by truth but by make-believe.

When I was a teenager, I continued to visit imaginary places by spending all my free time at our local community theater. Whether I acted in a play or worked backstage, the world of Tennessee Williams or Shakespeare always seemed more real to me than the dreary life of high school.

When you're playing a fictional character reacting to the real world, it's incredibly difficult and confusing and kind of messes with your values a bit.

I never watch 'Sopranos' reruns back home. As far as I am concerned, the nuclear family is still sitting around the luncheonette in New Jersey, munching and chatting, safe and together, and that's how it ended for me.

Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?

I don't believe that my first name is Leo or that my last name is Tolstoy. I'm a storyteller.

My life is a movie set. These people, they all think this is real, but it's not.

It may be a good thing to copy reality; but to invent reality is much, much better.

The movie is more real in so many ways than the life I am leading. No, that’s not true. I just desperately wish this was only a movie.

That's why I'm an actress - escaping into a world.

..when one has no real life, one lives by mirages. It's still better than nothing.

Truthfullness to life-both fantasy life and factual life-is the basis of all great art.

All interpretation or observation of reality is necessarily fiction. In this case, the problem is that man is a moral animal abandoned in an amoral universe and condemned to a finite existence with no other purpose than to perpetuate the natural cycle of the species. It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality, at least for a human being. We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake.

Reading was not an escape for her, any more than it is for me. It was an aspect of direct experience. She distinguished, of course, between the fictional world and the real one, in which she had to prepare dinners and so on. Still, for us, the fictional world was an extension of the real, and in no way a substitute for it, or refuge from it. Any more than sleeping is a substitute for waking." (Jincy Willett)

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.

I'm an unashamed realist, and actually, I try to make whatever the script is the reality of that situation, even though it's fictional.

My concern is how we live fictions, how fictions have real effects, become facts in that sense, and how our experience of the world changes depending on its arrangement into one narrative or another.

When a writer is already stretching the bounds of reality by writing within a science fiction or fantasy setting, that writer must realize that excessive coincidence makes the fictional reality the writer is creating less 'real.'

When I'm in the middle of a book it can go up from there. When you're putting in those hours, the real world kind of fades and the world you're creating becomes almost more real to you than the outside world.

We like nonfiction, and we live in fictitious times.

Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.