Lynn Shelton Quotes

We see North Koreans as automatons, goose-steeping at parades, doing mass gymnastics with fixed smiles on their faces - but beneath all that, real life goes on with the same complexity of human emotion as anywhere else.

Real life is far more complicated than fiction.

Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn't.

Real life is much stranger than fiction, man.

Nobody's perfect, and everybody plays the heel and the baby face at times in real life.

Reality always outstrips fiction. Whatever you make up, something more incredible always pops up in real life.

My influences come from real life. I'm not interested in cinema for cinema's sake. I'm interested in life - what one does and how one interacts.

I think the most useful thing you can do as a writer is to reconstruct real life with all its color, hardship, joy, and intrigue. If you're interested in people, you honor them best, I think, by making the fullest possible picture of them. Your subjects may - and from my experience probably will - protest your portrait of them.

I read fantasy books like the Harry Potter books, 'Twilight,' also biographies, and I like to read about people who have been through stuff like wars or lost their families - real life stuff, you know? I like to read about their experiences and how they coped with that.

The one thing that TV is bad at doing is preaching. There are two extremes, you either turn the people into a punchline or turn them into hero, and both of those things suck, because most people are neither in real life.

Basically, I think that there are some characters that you can just allow the truth of your character as a human being in your real life to come through.

One thing I think is least realistic is that there were five people that made decisions in the fictional 'West Wing.' In real life, there are about five million people that weigh in.

We all have dark sides to ourselves, and I want to portray that in a realistic way.

I've found you don't have to make anything up. Reality is so complex and fascinating and horrible and beautiful.

We can't constantly tell stories of heroes. We have to hear the other stories, too, about people in dire straits who make bad choices.

You don't wake up one morning and say, 'Today is going to be a comedy day.' And the next day, 'Today's going to be a drama day.' Things happen in life that are fun and light, and things happen that are heavier. You just have to move your way through life, and I think 'BoJack' is a good reflection of that.

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.

You can look at my books and not find particular joy on every page because, of course, what you want to write about is the difficulty of the human experience. You don't want to lie about things to make happy endings and weddings if they don't deserve to happen. But I would be lying if I didn't try to communicate some of the pleasure of being alive.

Life ain't a drama. And life isn't just a comedy. Life is sometimes horrifying. Life is science-fiction. There are all elements and faculties that we navigate, so I just expect a script to reflect that. As long as it's truthful. I think genre-bending is just being honest.

Life writes the best stories.

All my characters are quite relatable, as they are flawed, true, and honest. All of us are flawed; nobody is pure and pious.

But such is life, the silliest proverbs prove to be true, and when a man thinks, now it's all right, it's not all right by a longshot. Man proposes, God disposes, and there's always that last straw to break the camel's back.

It is essential to grasp the incontestable truth that a Marxist must take cognisance of real life, of the true facts of reality, and not cling to a theory of yesterday, which, like all theories, at best only outlines the main and the general, only comes near to embracing life in all its complexity.

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

The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!