Thomas Griffith Quotes

Realism is not a matter of any fidelity to an empirical reality, but of the discursive conventions by which and for which a sense of reality is constructed.

'The Princess and the Warrior' is looking at the same things as 'Lola' - just from a different angle.

I don't regard television as the outside world. I regard it as an artefact.

It's actually pretty complex, because there's two levels of reality in the narrative. One is what really took place, and the other is Spider's poisoned version of what took place.

I have always been a big meta guy because I think the way journalism is practiced in Washington, and the way everyone sort of cohabitates in the same fishbowl is ultimately a bigger part of the story than people outside of the fishbowl really know.

I think today that politics registers very late things which society manifests through other channels, and I feel that often politics distorts and mystifies reality.

The daily press, the immediate media, is superb at synecdoche, at giving us a small thing that stands for a much larger thing. Reporters on the ground, embedded or otherwise, can tell us about or send us pictures of what happened in that place at that time among those people.

People are so different in reality from the picture created of them on TV. So it's all a creation; everything is made up.

Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.

From a dramatic viewpoint, there are few professions that grant their members entry into other lives, high among them cops, doctors, clergymen, journalists and prostitutes. Perhaps that explains why they figure in so much television and cinema. Their lives are lived in the midst of human drama.

Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.

Media play a powerful role in establishing and perpetuating social norms.

Strange bonds of trust and self-deception tend to grow between journalists and their subjects.

The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive.

It's an odd experience reading interviews with yourself. Interesting, though. Of course, you know that the journalist will have edited, rephrased or even rewritten what you actually said, but you can't help feeling that there's a special kind of truth in the way someone else paints you, however subjective they might be.

It's not an anti-sex trip. Like, we're taking sex, which is probably another half of American entertainment, sex and violence, and we're projecting it, and we're saying this is the way everything is right now.

As far as I'm concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary.

Ideology has shaped the very sofa on which I sit.

In Modernism, reality used to validate media. In Postmodernism, the media validate reality. If you don't believe this, just think how many times you've described some real event as being 'just like a movie.'

The conventional definition of reality, and the idea of 'normal life', mean nothing.

I want people to think about movies and how we watch them. Let them know it's okay to question the structure or how we're sometimes duped into a false sense of normalcy. Most of all, I want people to question the old standard practices of, 'This is how the structure of something should work,' or, 'This is how a character must behave.'

The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform.

All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.

I suspect that we get used to particular sorts of stories being presented in particular sorts of ways, and we're so used to interpreting them and understanding what it is they're doing that we think of those forms and styles as faithful, complete depictions of reality.

I emerged in that incredible moment in the 1980s when all kinds of social questions about subjectivity and objectivity, about who was making, who was looking.