Aaron Spelling Quotes

Your parents want to think they have a healthy, happy family.

I've avoided doing network shows because I don't think they're true to real families.

If poets were realistic, they wouldn't be poets.

I only understand realism.

I think it's been a little difficult at times for the audience, because they've told me they see me as a family member. So to see your little sister sing about sex... I think they are pretty used to it now.

What ends up in your scrapbook? The pictures where you look like a good guy and a good family man, and the children look adorable - and they're screaming the next minute. I've never seen a family album of screaming people.

For a found-footage-style movie, there's a definite advantage in using unknowns, because it helps sell the illusion that it's real. A known actor would get in the way of the suspension of disbelief.

As a son of a man who pretended to be one thing for 33 years of my life and then was another thing, the questions of 'what is real' and 'what is not real' are very blurrily vivid to me.

The whole trick is to make it feel like you're spying on real people's lives as they get through the day. When I'm writing, I have to trick myself as a writer. If I consciously say, 'I'm writing,' I feel all this pressure and somehow it doesn't feel as real as when it doesn't seem to count as much.

What's realistic to me is that families love each other and stand by each other. What's unrealistic is that they would ever say that.

The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real.

The distinctive feature of my family was intolerance of sensitivity and emotion - 'Everything's great, it all has to be great all the time and why do you have to spoil it?' Whereas probably the most fundamental and important thing to me has been defending my right to tell the truth about how I feel.

My family was perfect.

But I'm not trying to convince anybody how to vote or how to live. Nobody's ever successfully accused me of being realistic.

As a writer of fiction, I spend my days inventing real lives for make-believe people; what I create can only seem real.

So you might say, 'Why do you end up making theatre in a world in which there is already too much of that? Creating layer upon layer of artifice?' Perhaps the function is to pierce through that cloud and show reality - so the function of art is to make things - to show: 'Hang on, this is real.'

I've had aunts and uncles who not only haven't read my books but could hardly believe that I was a writer.

The Brady family was what everyone wanted their family to be like.

I don't think we should be a model family living in a model home.

My dad's more three-dimensional than Opie Taylor or Richie Cunningham. He even has a temper! He's a real person. But some people are disappointed by that.

If I were to work with my mom, I probably would not want her to play my mom. That would get too real.

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.

Anyone who wants to have a perfect democracy is dreaming.

After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood.

My father was a minister, and it was more my mother that had the responsibility of making sure the family put out an outward of appearance of living what he was preaching. She was the PR.