Simon McBurney Quotes

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.

What is called a sincere work is one that is endowed with enough strength to give reality to an illusion.

In drama you can either pretend everything is OK, or you can show the world as it really is in the hope that it gets better.

You know what ART stands for? Above Real Truth.

VERISIMILITUDE (the appearance or semblance of truth)

It's a large as life and twice as natural

Realism is a corruption of reality.

There’s only one subject for fiction or poetry or even a joke: how it is. In all the arts, the payoff is always the same: recognition. If it works, you say that’s real, that’s truth, that’s life, that’s the way things are. ‘There it is.’

Photography threatens fantasy.

Art has a double face, of expression and illusion, just like science has a double face: the reality of error and the phantom of truth.

The more you act the further you get away from the truth.

I believe I am looking for rightness. My work has so much to do with reality that I wanted to have a corresponding rightness. That excludes painting in imitation. In nature everything is always right: the structure is right, the proportions are good, the colours fit the forms. If you imitate that in painting, it becomes false.

Truth is more of a stranger than fiction.

Realism: the wealth of detail guarantees the truth of the tale.

You can't write nothing that ain't real.

People think I'm into positive thinking. I'm not a positive thinking guy. I'm into the truth. I'm a hunter of human excellence.

Truth is a naked and open daylight, that does not show the masques, and mummeries, and triumphs of the world, half so stately and daintily as candle-lights. . . A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure

Reality even when it is sad is better than illusions. Illusions are at the mercy of any winds that blow. Real happiness must come from within, from a fixed purpose and faith in one's fellow men.

Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy.

The beauty of reality-based art - art underwritten by reality hunger - is that it's perfectly situated between life itself and (unattainable) "life as art".

Don't lies eventually lead to the truth? And don't all my stories, true or false, tend toward the same conclusion? Don't they all have the same meaning? So what does it matter whether they are true or false if, in both cases, they are significant of what I have been and what I am? Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.

A thing either is what it appears to be; or it is not, but yet appears to be; or it is, but does not appear to be; or it is not, and does not appear to be.

Since I wasn't able to leave a succession of beautiful lies, I want to leave the smidgen of truth that the falsehood of everything lets us suppose we can tell.

If they [the dead] should speak, it would be found that in matters of opinion no departed person was exactly what he had passed for in life. They would realise, deep down, that they, and whole nations along with them, are not really what they seem to be-and never can be.

A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.