Reality Is Unrealistic/Quotes

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Mass media have a terrible impact on people who lack guidance.

—Folklorist Linda Degh

I didn't think it was very realistic in the movie and it turns out it's pretty realistic.

Dwight Schrute, The Office, "Stress Relief"

Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true.

Niels Bohr

Man, reality sucks!

The Cat, Red Dwarf

Reality makes a crappy special effects crew.

—Adam Savage, MythBusters

Truth of course must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.

House: I was not wrong. Everything I said was true. It fit. It was elegant.
Dr. Wilson: So reality was wrong?
House: Reality is almost always wrong.

The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.

'Tis strange -- but true; for truth is always strange;
Stranger than fiction; if it could be told,

A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility. The story should never be made up of improbable incidents; there should be nothing of the sort in it.

Few people have the imagination for reality.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

That's the difference between truth and fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

Do you want to know the greatest and also the worst device that humans ever invented?
It's television.
Television controls people by bombarding them with information until they lose their sense of reality.
[...]
Television has created a people who believe instantly in dramatic fantasies who can be controlled by little dots of light.

Dr. Londes, Cowboy Bebop'

It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen.

The problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. That's not true with non-fiction.

Tom Wolfe, Advice to Writers

For example, few novels contain plot twists like the ones in the news story about a band of thieves posing as police officers who were forced by circumstances to try to arrest a group of policemen disguised as a gang of thieves.
The real police were — you guessed it — on the trail of the thieves who were posing as police. If a novelist were to submit such a plot to a publisher, it would probably be rejected as incredible or unrealistic.

W. Lance Bennet, News: The Politics of Illusion

Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense.
But the real universe is one step beyond logic.

—From "The sayings of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan, Dune
"These days we have become all too desensitised to violence on paper and on screen: real life violence is not ‘Schwarzenegger violence’, it does not have a certificate or a schedule; it is protracted, unglamorous, long-lasting and ruthless."

The problem is you can’t always write aliens. You can’t always write fairies. And I didn’t feel qualified to write Americans. And there’s only so many people without a past you can write. (I was hit over the head, I swear. I remember nothing but two minutes in the past.)
I decided to do the sensible thing and write stories set in Portugal and/or with Portuguese characters. It did not go WELL.
The BEST response I got (it was personal!) was a rejection informing me I was a narrowminded pain, who clearly had never been outside the US (this, btw, for a story I didn’t think was in ANY WAY critical of Portugal. Yeah, there are things that drive me nuts about the place, but I also love many of those things. Kind of like you’ll love the way your kid always looks scruffy. I thought that was clear in the story. The thing this person objected to? The fact that no one refrigerated anything and the fact that TO THEM the place sounded icky.)
[...]
That is, to write about Portugal, I had to know enough about the US to know at least what was LIKELY to be in the editor’s head when the word Portugal was said. I had to know what they expected.

Betraying A Little by Sarah A. Hoyt