Believability Quotes

Children are often better actors than adults because they have a greater capacity for believing in a situation.

To be persuasive we must be believable. To be believable, we must be truthful.

Propaganda, to be effective, must be believed. To be believed, it must be credible. To be credible, it must be true.

All that one gains by falsehood is, not to be believed when he speaks the truth.

Aristotle was once asked what those who tell lies gain by it. Said he - That when they speak truth they are not believed.

Reality is not always probable, or likely. But if you're writing a story, you have to make it as plausible as you can, because if not, the reader's imagination will reject it.

They say truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, but there's such a thing as believability when you're writing a novel.

I would never play a character that wasn't true. It's not a moral thing; it's just that it's more convincing if it's a little bit like me.

My dear, the real truth always sounds improbable, do you know that? To make truth sound probable you must always mix in some falsehood with it. Men have always done so.

He who mistrusts most should be trusted least.

I do crazy amounts of research. I want this stuff to 'work,' so to speak. I need to be, at least to me, believable - because if I feel - if I cannot invest some element of verisimilitude, the reader is absolutely not going to buy in.

Everyone is usually screwed up in some way and that is usually where the work comes in - figuring out how to make it believable and make it real to present someone's problems that you don't necessarily actually know anything about.

The very best way I can make any reader believe in the nuts and bolts of an art form... is to know the mechanics, to make the characters grounded in convincing detail.

When you're faced with a choice, you have one of three choices that you can have. You can have those with power decide. You can have one man, one vote. Or you can have believability-weighted decision-making.

They say that it is the practiced liar who can deceive. But so often the practiced and chronic liar deceives only himself; it is the man who all his life has been selfconvicted of veracity whose lies find quickest credence.

My friend, the truth is always implausible, did you know that? To make the truth more plausible, it's absolutely necessary to mix a bit of falsehood with it. People have always done so.

I'm more interested in people the way they are than what they've done onscreen before. So I don't worry much about the acting skills or the name, the status. I just think, 'Do I believe this person? Do I like them? Are they interesting, complicated, have the right aura, energy?'

I’ll lie as much as the next guy when my country’s interests are involved—if I have a chance of being believed..

Actors have to make you believe that it's happening for the first time and all that jazz and make it human and at the same time entertain you.

I think, specifically with the horror genre, you have to make it very believable because it can come across ridiculous.

Journalists want me to keep repeating myself and they don't see that it would make people think I didn't believe myself. If what I say isn't worth believing when I say it, what additional value would it have from being repeated? If I were to repeat that statement this afternoon, in two weeks the newspapers would all be clamoring to have me say it again. Then pretty soon I should have to say it every day, and nobody would believe it.

You can be a victim of a crime and not exercise great judgment. And when women have been sexually assaulted, they feel like they have to have been perfect in order to have anybody believe them. They think nobody will believe them unless a stranger jumped out from behind a bush with a knife - not that they got too drunk and that a guy they thought they knew, you know, took advantage of them in a physical, assaultive way.

Several excuses are always less convincing than one.

I have also led you astray by talking of technique as if it were something that could be separated from the rest of the story. Technique can't operate at all, of course, except on believable material.

Matter-of-fact descriptions make the improbable seem real.