Norman Douglas Quotes

Books are for those without real lives, he thought. And they are no real replacement.

Life is more than sunglasses and hit movies. Reality - that's the main event.

Let me tell you what, reality is better than any script you could ever write.

All true readers have a book, a moment when real life is never going to be able to compete with fiction again.

I don't write science fiction. I've only done one science fiction book and that's Fahrenheit 451, based on reality. Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal.

I'm not really a person who loves things that are surreal or not grounded in real life or reality. I like that - I want to find something that I can relate to and then maybe do a little bit more and embellish.

And all the while, I suppose," he thought, "real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them.

You may be real, but you're still stuck in a book.

[I]nstead of the usual "Why can't we make movies more like real life?" I think a more pertinent question is "Why can't real life be more like the movies?"

If you make things too real, sometimes you bring it down to the mundane.

There's no real objection to escapism, in the right places... We all want to escape occasionally. But science fiction is often very far from escapism, in fact you might say that science fiction is escape into reality... It's a fiction which does concern itself with real issues: the origin of man; our future. In fact I can't think of any form of literature which is more concerned with real issues, reality.

I live a real life so I forget to take pictures.

When you blow away the foam, you get down to the real stuff.

The true ideal is not opposed to the real but lies in it; and blessed are the eyes that find it.

Following takes why. Transactions take what. It has to be real. It has to be the same for writing a book.

Life is lived in real places, and I shoot in real places.

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.’

At last she shut the book sharply, lay back, and drew a deep breath, expressive of the wonder which always marks the transition from the imaginary world to the real world.

I don't know how everybody else feels, but I just long for reality rather than these made-up things.

Rule one of reading other people's stories is that whenever you say 'well that's not convincing' the author tells you that's the bit that wasn't made up. This is because real life is under no obligation to be convincing.

You can tell a book is real when your heart beats faster. Real books make you sweat. Cry, if no one is looking. Real books help you make sense of your crazy life. Real books tell it true, don't hold back and make you stronger. But most of all, real books give you hope. Because it's not always going to be like this and books-the good ones, the ones-show you how to make it better. Now.

Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.

And I realized again that real life is different from reel life.

It was good, it was bad. But it was real, and that's all you have.

A book is a door, you know. Always and forever. A book is a door into another place and another heart and another world.