Top 75 Realist Quotes

I’m a realist.

The sentences I write have their roots in song and poetry, and take their bearings from music and painting, as much as from the need to impart mere information, or mirror anything. I am not a realist writer, even if I seem like one.

The common belief is that you are either a dreamer or a realist. But idealism and pragmatism aren’t as far apart as one might think.

Folks, the zombies are not on television – they are in Washington, D.C., and they meet at the Capitol Hill Club and call themselves ‘Realists.’

I don’t think of myself as a metafictional writer at all. I think of myself as a classic writer, a realist writer, who tends to have flights of fancy at times, but nevertheless, my feet are mostly on the ground.

I was quite excited, but I was sure I wouldn’t win the race. I am a realist.

I’m a dreamer and a realist.

I have realised that my time has come and gone. I’m not bitter, just a realist.

I’m a realist. Where I come from, ‘phenomenons’ don’t exist. I’m from a land where people make mistakes and try again, harder, faster; where negativity is not an option.

You can cooperate and not compromise your core values. But I’m a realist with the philosophy that sometimes you’ve got to take bites out of the apple instead of the whole apple.

I’m a realist.

Today, I don’t have any psychological scars, because I am a realist and an optimist. After all, I can’t lose my legs twice.

Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I’m a realist.

I only want three children for every family. I’m a Christian, but I’m a realist, so we have to do something with our overpopulation. I will defy the opinion or the belief of the Church.

As an artist, my wheelhouse is 19th-century literature. I want to write realist novels in a Victorian sense, and the writers I admire in that style tend to do omniscient narration.

I was really exposed to great old-time literature – the classics, the poetic realists like Strindberg and Ibsen and all those guys. I was really inspired by all those guys. That’s when writing became a primary focus.

I sing to the realists; people who accept it like it is.

There are two men in Tolstoy. He is a mystic and he is also a realist. He is addicted to the practice of a pietism that for all its sincerity is nothing if not vague and sentimental; and he is the most acute and dispassionate of observers, the most profound and earnest student of character and emotion.

When I was very, very young, seven years old, I heard there was school where you could go to learn to draw. That was my absolute driven passion, to become an artist or a painter. So the romantic realist in me, I studied to be a graphic design artist and an art teacher.

People say I’m such a pessimist, but I always was. It never stopped me from doing what I had to do. I would say I’m a realist.

In order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.

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.

I write from what I take to be the realist’s point of view, looking at life as it really is – or the way I see it to be.

A novel, even a social realist one, can’t simply be a comprehensive rendering of what is. A novel requires a special angle or approach, whether in structure or language or theme, to justify itself.

I’m a realist, not a sugar coater. I believe in always letting people know what their obstacles are. And at the end of the day, I just want to be respected for my hard work.

When I was younger, I was somewhat of an idealist. I guess I’m a little bit more of a realist now. I think there’s a lot that can be done to make the world a better place, but it’s more about choosing your battles.

I don’t ever want to be a sentimentalist. I prefer to be a realist. I’m not a romantic really.

If I can see my own recollections, like many adolescents, I was a Platonic realist. I believed in the reality of ideas, of the big nouns, and believed that one’s life was determined by the ideas of the true, the good, and the beautiful which one held.

The magical and fantastical isn’t something I’m uncomfortable with in books, and I chafe slightly at the idea that a purely realist novel somehow has more value.

I’m a realist.

I like to be an optimist, but I like to be a realist, too.

I’m very much a realist.

I’m a realist about who really reads books and who acts like they read books.

I’m painfully a realist but ruthlessly an optimist. I think maybe it’s because of my faith – I’ve always got the hope that there is something out there to make it all worthwhile.

The magical and fantastical isn’t something I’m uncomfortable with in books, and I chafe slightly at the idea that a purely realist novel somehow has more value.

It may be said that modern Europe with teachers who inform it that its realist instincts are beautiful, acts ill and honors what is ill.

Realists do not fear the results of their study.

The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.

I’m a realist.

This may sound trite, but bad things happen to good people, and when you’re facing terrorism, natural disaster, you can have every wonderful plan in place, but I am a realist.

An idealist believes the short run doesn’t count. A cynic believes the long run doesn’t matter. A realist believes that what is done or left undone in the short run determines the long run.

I’m a confident person in knowing my abilities, but also know, I’m kind of a realist, I know when I suck.

I’m a realist – yes, I know: darn, I’m unlikely to have a love scene with Chris Hemsworth anytime soon, if ever. But I also believe that persistence and hard work pays off.

I think there’s a joy to be had in taking readers where they just don’t want to go. If you are writing a properly realist novel, then don’t blink. Why not see something for what it is and render it truthfully? I find it a good way of going about writing – not to blink.

I’m not coming in as an advocate of sports gambling. I’m trying to be more of a realist to say it’s going on in a massive way… and I think the right course would be therefore to legalize it and regulate it.

I have for a long time loved fabulist, imaginative fiction, such as the writing of Italo Calvino, Jose Saramago, Michael Bulgakov, and Salman Rushdie. I also like the magic realist writers, such as Borges and Marquez, and feel that interesting truths can be learned about our world by exploring highly distorted worlds.

I’m a realist, I understand football and situations in the game.

‘Line of Duty’ is a social realist drama, so it’s set in a world that has the recognisable features of the authentic world we see around us.

The kind of theater that I do is sort of ‘narrative realism,’ which I think in the broadest sense is legitimate to say is mainstream. I mean, in a certain sense, Suzan-Lori’s plays have had mainstream levels of success. But Suzan-Lori is in some ways not a narrative realist.

What I dislike is conventional realism – a system of gestures, descriptions, psychological revelations that was once a vital way of representing the world but has become hackneyed through endless repetition. I’d argue that a conventional realist isn’t a realist at all, but a falsifier of the real.

I don’t think I’ve ever been just like, happy with life. I live life as a realist.

With a lot of these social realist films, the first thing you do is drain the color.

There are those who would draw a sharp line between power politics and a principled foreign policy based on values. This polarized view – you are either a realist or devoted to norms and values – may be just fine in academic debate, but it is a disaster for American foreign policy. American values are universal.

I’m always a realist, and I know the world of football is fast-moving.

In my own writing, I think of myself as a realist who exaggerates a little.

People who label themselves as ‘realists’ are usually accurate – they see to the real edge of what they know, understand, or believe. At best, these folks tend to be caring worriers.

I’m a realist.

I may be an aspiring actor, but I am also a realist.

There seems to me to be something admirable, indeed noble, about the people arguing over Richard III. They’re doers rather than naysayers, romantics rather than realists, people looking for meaning rather than numbness.

I’m a realist about how the networks work.

I don’t personally consider myself Dr. Doom. I call myself Dr. Realist, even though it’s less exciting and more boring than being called Dr. Doom. If you are consistently saying ‘the world is going to end,’ who is going to listen to you?

I am a mixture of idealist and realist.

I’m an eternal realist and the success rate for being an actor is pretty low.

We sometimes forget that human invention can also be a subject of human invention: that might seem a modern notion, or a postmodern one, but novelists have taken time – sometimes time out from their realist fixations – to source and satirise the speech and power we rely on.