"Ultimately, the goal in writing good fiction isn't 'accuracy', it's believability. The goal is to take the more fantastical elements and give them a sense of verisimilitude. For science fiction, scientific accuracy in anything not hand waved for the good of the story is a good start. If you want to preserve the sense of being real, you have to diverge as little as possible in your hand waving."
"The properties of people and the properties of character have almost nothing to do with each other. I know it seems like they do, because we look alike, characters and people, but people don't speak in dialogue, their lives don't unfold in a series of scenes that form a narrative arc. The rules of drama are very much separate from the likes of the properties of life."
"Stromberg's plan in The Spy Who Loved Me is to kidnap British and Russian submarines to start a war, why? Surely he'd be better off hunting American and Russian craft? Elliot Carver in Tomorrow Never Dies wants the story of the century about a war between China and the UK? Surely Britain is a little out of their league, here? A cynical person might call that inflated sense of importance a delusion, but that misses the key part of the trick... No nation in the world fears unilateral British military action, so Bond becomes a cute fantasy. If he were American, the connotations would be entirely different — the movies would be derided as puff and propaganda."
"We play more to the icon and the myth in this book than to facts, and so should you in your stories. In doing research, this book's writers have come up with some pretty sad details. You'll see Vincent the Chin staggering around the neighbourhood in his bathrobe, pretending to be insane. You'll see nepotism at its worst, with John Gotti Jr being handed the reins of the most visible crime family in the world. To hell with all this: this book accepts them as facts, but also sweeps their gravity under the rug. For the sake of the story, they still happened, but they're footnotes in the continuing legacy of Carlo Gambino, Joe Masseria, Bugsy Siegel, Lucky Luciano, Sam Giancana, and all the rest. It's still an era of Frank Sinatra songs, Marlon Brando imagery, Mario Puzo bombast and governors shaking hands with dons. [...]
Yes, it's unrealistic, but it's an icon."
Yes, it's unrealistic, but it's an icon."
— Old World of Darkness: Mafia
"Never nitpick over realism with your Game Master. Unless you enjoy your wounds being infected with gangrene, rather than healing with a long rest."
"I have had some remarkably po-faced discussions with people who have solemnly informed me that [Fifty Shades of Grey] is not a good example of a BDSM relationship. And you know what? They are right. It isn't. It's a fantasy. You know something else? Hogwarts would very likely fail an Ofsted inspection."
— Fifty Shades Of Nay
, by Robert King
, by Robert King"It might not be realistic, but it's much easier to play with the shadow directly below."
—Yoshiaki Koizumi, assistant director of Super Mario 64
"And I really heard it when this 'mosquito' cartoon came out. Numerous readers wrote to remind me that it’s the female that does the biting, not the male. I knew this. (Of course, it’s perfectly acceptable that these creatures wear clothes, live in houses, speak English, etc.)"
— Gary Larson, The PreHistory of The Far Side
You'd be sitting in a design review and somebody said "that's not realistic" and you're like: Okay... why does it have- explain to me why that's interesting, because in the real world I have to write up lists of stuff I have to go to the grocery store to buy. And I've never thought to myself that realism is fun. I play games to have fun.
Note: [the Real World] is more real than Barbie Land but still heightened, like a 1980s comedy - slightly exaggerated. Like there is no way Ferris Bueller sang the Beatles at that German parade, but we allow it because it’s fun. Same here.
— Screenplay for Barbie (2023)
