Believable Quotes

You have a lot more leeway to be contradictory playing a character than most of the scripts have in them. That's how all actors are. We have so many different sides of ourselves and we're so different, in meeting with different people. The audiences relate more to that and find that more believable. ~ Joel Kinnaman

I think that's because believable action is based on authenticity, and accuracy is very important to me. I always spend time researching my novels, exploring the customs and attitudes of the county I'm using for their setting. ~ Sidney Sheldon

That's our cue to depart."
"They know something " I pointed out.
"I know something too. I know we're going to attract a lot of unwanted attention if they keep screaming. And then we have to make up some ridiculous explanation about how we heard screaming through the vents in our rooms and we followed the sound back to the basement and we found these girls lying on the ground and pretending to be tied up by invisible rope because they're practicing for the regional mime championships."
I blinked at her. "Is that explanation more or less believable than we woke up because two girls who are actually evil magicians tripped a magical alarm wired to a door in the basement we aren't supposed to know about "
Scout paused for a minute then nodded. "Point made. ~ Chloe Neill

I don't worry about whether a character is likable, as long as the character is believable. ~ Matt Dillon

Why do you want to know?"
The shrug again. "Just wondering."
"Really. You've skipped your lawn tennis or duck hunting or whiskey drinking or whatever else people of your sort do all day, only to come all the way out to the island to ask me about the piano piece. Because you were just wondering." I pushed away from the door. "Coming here to kiss me would have been more believable."
"Well, it was second on my list."
"I'm not intimidated by you," I said, blunt. "If you're hoping I'll turn out to be some pathetic, blubbering little rag-girl who begs you not to ruin her, you're in for a surprise."
"That's good." Lord Armand met my eyes. "I like surprises."
We gazed at each other, he on the bed and me by the door, neither of us giving quarter. It seemed to me that the room was growing even more dim, that time was repeating the same ploy it had pulled in Jesse's cottage, drawing out long and slow. The storm outside railed against the castle walls, drowning the air within. It layered darkness through Armand's eyes, the once-vivid blue now deep as the ocean at night.
Beyond my window the rain fell and fell, fat clouds weeping as if they'd never stop.
"Nice bracelet," Armand said softly. "Did you steal it?"
I shook my head. "You gave it to me."
"Did I?"
"As far as everyone else if concerned, yes. You did."
"Hmm. And what do I get in return for agreeing to be your…benefactor?"
"The answer to your question."
"No kiss?" ~ Shana Abe

I do keep getting these bad girl roles. The funny thing is that, honestly, I don't think I'm believable as these aristocratic mean girls. But I do love playing them. ~ Katie McGrath

If you want to make a lie believable, you gotta weave it with the truth."
My brows furrow, confused by the comment. "What?"
"Two truths and a lie, babe," he says. "Makes the lie harder to pick up on. ~ Ashley Stoyanoff

Always craft a story from real life encounters. It is more believable and you are able to tell it with some emotion. ~ Khalid Muhammad

The story she had told me was possible, but it was not believable. ~ Giacomo Casanova

William Shakespeare was a brilliant writer and he only wrote the truth. So, if I don't believe it, I have to work really hard to see what that truth is so that I do; that's the only way I can make it believable for the audience. ~ Condola Rashad

Doubt is a question mark; faith is an exclamation point. The most compelling, believable, realistic stories have included them both. ~ Criss Jami

I wanted the figures to be real and believable so that you would feel that with their very next breath would begin life itself. ~ Irving Stone

American traditions and the American ethic require us to be truthful, but the most important reason is that truth is the best propaganda and lies are the worst. To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful. It is as simple as that. ~ Edward R. Murrow

The whole essence of good drawing - and of good thinking, perhaps - is to work a subject down to the simplest form possible and still have it believable for what it is meant to be. ~ Chuck Jones

The best fiction writers are the most believable liars... ~ Bea Cannon

An open ear is the only believable sign of an open heart. ~ David W Augsburger

I really, deeply believe in the primacy of character. I believe that my job as a writer is to put a believable human being on a page. ~ Ayana Mathis

People who've read my reviews know my tastes, know how I approach a book, know my background. I can write with believable authority. It doesn't mean I'm always right. ~ Michael Dirda

In true-life dramas, you have to do so much research. It's a big responsibility to make sure things are as correct as possible. In 'Robin Hood', you have more artistic license - it's all action, adventure and reaction. This gives everyone a chance to make their characters their own and to make them believable. ~ Joanne Froggatt

Really? Is there anyone here one hundred percent human? No. I think dying from an unbuckled belt is the least of our concerns right now." – Sasha
"And I don't put it in drive until everyone's secure. That means you, wolfboy." – Sundown
"Un-frakkin'-believable. I'm in hell. With a lunatic. Might as well have stayed with Zarek. Next thing you know, you'll be drowning pancakes with syrup, too. (He made a grand showing of buckling himself in.) Hope you get fleas." – Sasha ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

He'd found himself intrigued by the way she'd weaved the lives of two very different people together, how she played off their strengths and weakness, how against all odds she brought them together and made it seem believable. Even if it was nothing more than make-believe. She was a talented writer. ~ M.K. Meredith

She woke from dreamless rest to find her lap filled with wildflowers-blue and gold violets, white starworts with bright yellow centers, wild geraniums, purple heather, pale lavender bellflowers, creamy butterworts...a treasure trove of nature's jewels.
"Where did these come from?" she asked her warrior husband.
He leaned back on his elbows and studied the sea. "Some trolls came by and left them."
"Trolls picking flowers?"
"More believable, surely, than me doing it?"
She laughed and surprised him by competently weaving the summer's late blossoms into a garland for her hair.
"How is it you know how to do that," he asked, "when you are so thoroughly undomestic?"
She threw a purple aster at him and laughed again. "I thought I was managing to conceal that."
"Oh,certainly. ~ Josie Litton

Just because it's true, doesn't mean it's believable or interesting. ~ Josh Becker

Bringing back the Golden Fleece," I repeated, mocking him. "As if it exists."
Castor frowned. "What's biting you? Of course it exists! We told you what Jason said. It belonged to a marvelous ram sent by the gods to rescue two royal children, Phrixus and Helle, from their murderous stepmother. A pity it wasn't a perfect rescue. Phrixus reached Colchis safely, but his sister, Helle, fell off in mid-flight and drowned. Jason says that's why the place where she plunged into the sea's called the Hellespont. If that doesn't prove the story's true, what will satisfy you?"
"Anyone can give a place a name," I said, rolling my eyes. "When I get home, I'll name that olive grove near our training ground Wolf Forest and see what happens. A ram with a fleece of real gold, a flying ram that could carry the children through the skies to Colchis, where there are dragons, oh yes, that's believable! That's worth risking your lives for on a voyage across the world! I'll bet you don't care if that story's true or not. You just want an excuse to go off chasing fame!"
Polydeuces set a honey cake on my already heaping plate. "There must be something waiting for us in Colchis, little sister," he said gently. "Maybe not the gold fleece of a flying ram, but something. Why would Jason go to the trouble and expense of outfitting a ship for such a long, dangerous voyage otherwise?" He smiled wistfully and added, "You mustn't worry about us. We'll come back; we'll be fine."
He was right ~ Esther M. Friesner

Un-fucking-believable," Mark muttered. "In a country where they let embryos drive cars, I have to wait until I'm twenty-one to buy alcohol. What sort of place lets you drive and vote and fuck before it lets you drink a beer?" He glared at Deacon accusingly. "Well? ~ Lisa Henry

I'm not super-comfortable with it. I feel the less you project of yourself the more you can be believable as a character. I also think it's just better for your own mental health. Then you can be a human being and change your mind and nobody asks you questions about it! ~ Evelyne Brochu

Authors must spend months, years making fantasy believable in a single work while reality runs rampant and complete chaos elsewhere. ~ Don Roff

The bigger the lie, the more believable it becomes to the average Arab citizen. Thus, Arab media never fail to be less than outrageous. They blamed the defeat on none other than Israel, as though self-defense and self-preservation was not a right to be exercised by the Jewish enemy. ~ Nonie Darwish

Then there were her childhood book: Anne of Green Gables, Heidi, What Katy did next, Pollyanna - stories about girls who were good. All Pollyanna had ever done wrong was ruin her parasol. Beth in Little Women was so perfect she was only fit for heaven. Why were girls in novels exemplary, almost saintly? Grace preferred adventure stories, histories and romances about what to do if you were damned and female, tales about women who were kind, likeable and believable, who escaped unpunished. No thin Quakers with lace caps. No beatific consumptives coughing delicately. No unloved, eternally jolly orphans. Grace craved books about girls like herself: good women, normal women in a world bigger and more powerful than themselves. ~ Wendy Jones

I stepped toward the car, trying to plan what to do, which was impossible because I did not know what they wanted, or even who they were. It was no longer believable that it was merely a random crazy - not if he knew where I lived. But who was it? Who had any reason to act like this? Among the living, I mean, because there were plenty of former victims who might have loved to come after me, but they were all far beyond any sort of action at all, other than decomposition. I ~ Jeff Lindsay

Many of Judy Blume's books - which I devoured when I was growing up and where I found characters that were believable because they were a lot like me - caused considerable consternation when they were first published, but now they're widely accepted as an essential part of the children's literary canon. ~ Jeff Kinney

There is no trick to writing a believable love story, a heartbreaking scene or real-sounding dialogue. All you need is to tell the truth. It's always heartbreaking. ~ Ethan Hawke

Why all this insistence on the senses? Because in order to convince your reader that he is THERE, you must assault each of his senses, in turn, with color, sound, taste, and texture. If your reader feels the sun on his flesh, the wind fluttering his shirt sleeves, half your fight is won. The most improbable tales can be made believable, if your reader, through his senses, feels certain that he stands at the middle of events. He cannot refuse, then, to participate. The logic of events always gives way to the logic of the senses. ~ Ray Bradbury

I never think about my style but just try and make the pictures look believable. ~ Lucian Freud

Mr. Robertson Davies has also suggested in his Deptford Trilogy that the same great truism which applies to writing, painting, picking horses at the track, and telling lies in a sincerely believable way, also applies to magic: some people got the knack, and some people don't. Hilly didn't. ~ Stephen King

You can handle just about anything that comes at you out on the road with a believable grin, common sense and whiskey. ~ Bill Murray

Most of the people who have verbally asserted that 'there is no master of pronounciation' have intentionally made a claim and unintentionally made their claim believable. (It is 'pro-nun-ciation' not 'pro-noun-ciation'.) ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Barry Schlenker's self-identity theory (1982) asserts that self-presentation is an attempt to control information about your identity before real or imagined audiences - including yourself. People try to provide explanations of their own conduct; they try to construct an identity that is satisfying to themselves and that explains their behavior in a favorable light. One of the criteria of a good explanation is believability; that is, explanations must fit with existing knowledge. Schlenker argues that people are not motivated to attain cognitive consistency as an end in itself; rather, they need to provide a believable and self -beneficial account of their conduct, and consistency is a by-product of that. The need to provide explanations for your conduct results in the construction of an internally consistent view of reality. ~ James Kennedy

I think even the characters that are fundamentally evil and wrong, I want people to really love them. I think that's important to writing believable characters. They don't have to be likable but they have to be loved, at least by the author. ~ Mark Russell

Fiction is as easy as telling a convincing lie. The more believable the better the story. ~ T.R. Wallace

For me the voice is the most important, but making your singing believable makes a great performer. ~ Hollie Cavanagh

One of the most difficult things to say to another person is, I hope that you will love me for no good reason. But it is what we all want and rarely dare to say to one another – to our children, to our parents and mates, to our friends, and to strangers. Especially to strangers, who have neither good nor bad reasons to love us. And it's why we tell each other stories that we pray will be transformed in the telling by that angel on the roof, made believable and about us all, no matter who we are to one another and who we are not. ~ Russell Banks

Left Behind takes what to some people may be unbelievable predictions from the Bible and shows how they might play out. It makes the events of biblical prophecy understandable and thus believable. ~ Jerry B. Jenkins

Pixar films are not realistic. They are believable for the worlds we are creating. ~ John Lasseter

The big issue with rock stars becoming actors is that sometimes it's not believable, and vice versa with actors becoming rock stars. Sometimes just doesn't fit. ~ Larry Mullen, Jr.

I'm sensitive. I'm nothing but a big ball of mushy sensitive stuff inside. Tell her, pumpkin."

"Your son is very sensitive," I dutifully recited.

"That didn't sound believable." He gently tugged on a strand of my hair, moving in closer. "My feelings are hurt. You've wounded me. Kiss it better."

"Apologies." I gave him a brief but sweet kiss on the lips.

"That the best you got?" He rubbed his lips against mine, trying to lure me in deeper. "You should be ashamed of yourself. I think you can do much, much better than that. Why, you missed my mouth entirely. ~ Kylie Scott

I don't understand that, because I think that what people like most about the show is that they recognize themselves in the characters and their problems, so the more believable the family is, the more we can draw the audience in. ~ Patricia Richardson

I, for one, am quite willing to join the 'forgive, forget and move on' crowd, but it does make me wonder if Evangelicals are going to sound believable when they say that they tend to vote Republican because of their religious commitments to the family. ~ Tony Campolo

I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The worst thing about getting older is you discover that most of the performers in the shows you used to watch are now younger than you. Suddenly, everything become less believable. ~ Neil A. Hogan

WHY DID YOU TELL PEOPLE MY ESSAY WASN'T TRUE?"

"I don't know," he said, breaking out in a sweat. "Because I don't believe it. I don't believe anyone could be so well adjusted."

She typed. "WHY NOT?"

"You said you look at your friends' lives and feel like your own is better, which is fine, except that you don't have any friends."

"HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT?"

"I sit behind you. I notice things."

"WHAT KIND OF THINGS?"

"It's not your fault that you don't have any friends. You always have an aide with you. No one is going to be themselves when there's a teacher standing right there. Plus, you talked about parties and dances, but I don't think you've even been to any, so how would you know what you're not sorry to be missing?"

He kept going. He started saying too much, telling her all the things he'd noticed - that she never said hi to other kids, that she never answered questions when people asked her things before class. "I'm not pretending I'm Mr. Popularity or anything. I'm just saying you've got this whole message that doesn't seem believable. To me, anyway."

"I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU'RE SAYING THIS."

Her facial expressions were impossible to read. He couldn't tell how mad she was. Probably pretty mad. "I'm sorry. You're right. I shouldn't have said anything. It's none of my business. Like, none at all. I don't know why I just said all that. I had this theory that you're trying ~ Cammie McGovern

Freudian psychoanalytical theory is a mythology that answers pretty well to Levi-Strauss's descriptions. It brings some kind of order into incoherence; it, too, hangs together, makes sense, leaves no loose ends, and is never (but never) at a loss for explanation. In a state of bewilderment it may therefore bring comfort and relief ... give its subject a new and deeper understanding of his own condition and of the nature of his relationship to his fellow men. A mythical structure will be built up around him which makes sense and is believable-in, regardless of whether or not it is true. ~ Peter Medawar

I will say I was a lot bigger as Superman. A lot bigger. I'm not saying how much. It's modesty about the weight - I've always been worried about my weight - but I also don't want to invite that debate: 'Henry weighs this, so he's the perfect Superman.' Or, 'Henry doesn't weigh this, and therefore he's not believable in the role.' ~ Henry Cavill

Love is both hard and soft. It is the most believable truth and fiction. It is something we fight for and fight with. It is the yin and yang. It is the most contradictory of emotions, making you believe in both the extraordinary existence of heaven and scorches of hell. If you allow it, a saturation of complexities can destroy it and leave you desperately choking for the remnants, clawing for a miniscule flake of ash of what you had . True love is a rare miracle held in the highest veneration. Blessed are those who even come close its illumination. Only those who are selflessly brave can become victorious and claim this exceptional phenomenon, if just for a memory in time. ~ S.V.C. Ricketts

I like to think of what happens to characters in good novels and stories as knots
things keep knotting up. And by the end of the story
readers see an unknotting of sorts. Not what you expect, not the easy answers you get on TV, not wash and wear philosophies, but a reproduction of believable, emotional experiences. ~ Terry McMillan

I always try to write about believable people. ~ Danielle Steel

The role of an actor is to make every character believable. ~ Orlando Bloom

As a writer, I try to appeal to the 'elusive boy audience' the same way I try to appeal to everyone: I do the very best I can to create interesting characters, addictive plots, tons of conflict, believable settings, unexpected plot twists, intriguing beginnings, and satisfying endings. ~ Marie Lu

Several shades of the color, cloudy, silvery shades, churn underneath the surface of his skin, making him look marbled, textured. It paints a barely believable portrait. Every feature on him works in harmony to create, well, a person. But he's unlike any person I've ever seen. ~ Chelsea Scott

I've learned that the most unbelievable is the most believable. ~ H.C. Deboard

If you want to write believable fiction, you will have to cross over the line of your self-restraint and revel in the words and ideas that you would never express in your everyday life. ~ Walter Mosley

I hope that what it comes down to at the end of the day is that people believe that I believe what I'm singing. It comes down to being believable. You don't have to be likeable; generally, though, I think I am. ~ John Mayer

I gain nothing but pleasure from writing fiction; short stories are foreplay, novellas are heavy petting – but novels are the full monte. Frankly, if I didn't enjoy writing novels I wouldn't do it – the world hardly needs any more and I can think of numerous more useful things someone with my skills could be engaged in. As it is, the immersion in parallel but believable worlds satisfies all my demands for vicarious experience, voyeurism and philosophic calithenics. I even enjoy the mechanics of writing, the dull timpani of the typewriter keys, the making of notes – many notes – and most seducttive of all: the buying of stationery. That the transmogrification of my beautiful thoughts into a grossly imperfect prose is always the end result doesn't faze me: all novels are only a version- there is no Platonic ideal. But I'd go further still: fiction is my way of thinking about and relating to the world; if I don't write I'm not engaged in any praxis, and lose all purchase. ~ Will Self

History is indeed stranger than fiction. The twists and turns of human history are too outlandish for to be believable in any work of fiction. ~ A.E. Samaan

I'm straight, but the character was too important to me to muddle his world with my private life. As a nobody, I got away with that deflection. I think it may have helped to introduce Brian as a believable gay man. Maybe not. However it played, it's been out of my hands for a long time. ~ Gale Harold

Wylan!" Jesper said, taking in the cuts and rapidly forming bruises. "Saints, is all that real?"
"Anika and Keeg did a number on him."
"I wanted it to be believable," said Wylan.
"I admire your commitment to the craft," said Kaz. "Jesper, stay with Wylan. They're going to want to question him."
"I'm fine," said Wylan, though his lip was so swollen it sounded more like, "I'b fibe. ~ Leigh Bardugo

I have to make this love affair believable enough. It's very European. ~ Chita Rivera

Let's face it: Sadness and evil are always more believable than happiness and love. When a movie reviewer calls a film "realistic," everyone knows what that means
it means the movie has an unhappy ending. ~ Chuck Klosterman

Sometimes in Brazil, I work harder to make characters different and believable and to overcome the persona I have. ~ Rodrigo Santoro

It's believable because great things don't happen without hard work ~ Robert Griffin III

The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it. ~ Flannery O'Connor

All the sentences in Madame Bovary could be examined with wonder, but there is one in particular that always stops me in admiration. Flaubert has just shown us Emma at the piano with Charles watching her. He says, "She struck the notes with aplomb and ran from top to bottom of the keyboard without a break. Thus shaken up, the old instrument, whose strings buzzed, could be heard at the other end of the village when the window was open, and often the bailiff's clerk, passing along the highroad, bareheaded and in list slippers, stopped to listen, his sheet of paper in his hand."

The more you look at a sentence like that, the more you can learn from it. At one end of it, we are with Emma and this very solid instrument "whose strings buzzed," and at the other end of it we are across the village with this very concrete clerk in his list slippers. With regard to what happens to Emma in the rest of the novel, we may think that it makes no difference that the instrument has buzzing strings or that the clerk wears list slippers and has a piece of paper in his hand, but Flaubert had to create a believable village to put Emma in. It's always necessary to remember that the fiction writer is much less immediately concerned with grand ideas and bristling emotions than he is with putting list slippers on clerks. ~ Flannery O'Connor

And the most important thing - apart from telling a good, believable story, and being a true character - is to be someone the audience will care about, even if you're playing a murderer or rapist. ~ Anna Friel

Trying to make something as tricky as 'Room' really believable is extremely hard, and it largely rests with that relationship between the actors and the director, and the director and the crew. ~ Lenny Abrahamson

Sorry," I say to my father. "Hope we didn't wake you. After last night, I wanted to check on Harlin's arm."

He tilts his head like he is absolutely sure I'm lying. "And how is his arm, Elise?" he asks.

"Uh . . . better?"

My father stands motionless for a second, and then he shakes his head and walks into the kitchen. I hear the clink of cups, and then the running of water for the coffeepot.

"That was a nice save," Harlin says, sounding amused. "So detailed. Like a nurse."

"Shut up, Harlin," I say, trying not to smile. "I didn't hear you offer anything better."

"You sure you didn't want to tell him we were playing doctor? That might have sounded more believable."

I turn quickly and swat at him. He laughs, dodging my swing, and catches my hand. "I would tackle you right here," he says, leaning close. "Pin you and kiss you. But with the luck we have in your house, someone will walk in. And then what will you tell them?" he whispers. "That you were giving me CPR?"

"Stop!" I slap his shoulder again. ~ Suzanne Young

I'm not good at dialogue. I'm not good at holding a mirror up at a real world. I'm not good at believable characterisation. ~ Jim Crace

Well, you put a little piece of yourself into every character that you do. Even if you're playing some psychotic person, which of course I'm not, some part of you is in that character and it's hopefully believable. I always come back to the fact that my own instinct is better than something I build in my mind. ~ Scarlett Johansson

I don't really think in terms of making something that is going to be bought everywhere, because I don't read those things. My writing is a process in which I try my best to make good sentences and a sequence of events that is compelling and believable. ~ Tom Drury

The idea is that people remember two things about an experience: the peak, and the end. In a poker game, when people think about another player they'll mostly remember any really good hands that the player got, and how he was doing at the end of the game. You took care to win only on believable hands and to leave on a losing streak - you completely blanked their peak-end retention. ~ Anonymous

Five per cent vision is better than no vision at all. Five per cent hearing is better than no hearing at all. Five per cent flight efficiency is better than no flight at all. It is thoroughly believable that every organ or apparatus that we actually see is the product of a smooth trajectory through animal space, a trajectory in which every intermediate stage assisted survival and reproduction. ~ Richard Dawkins

In a political sense, there is one problem that currently underlies all of the others. That problem is making Government sufficiently responsive to the people. If we don't make government responsive to the people, we don't make it believable. And we must make government believable if we are to have a functioning democracy. ~ Gerald R. Ford

Truth is never perfect, never squares with all expectations. Truth always poses doubts and questions. Only lies are one hundred percent believable, because they don't need to justify reality, they simply have to tell us what we want to hear. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

What people are looking for is you. As a leader, people need you to be clear about and demonstrate a passion for your purpose. They want to know that you practice your values consistently. And they absolutely want to know that you lead from your heart as well as your head. People are not looking for you to say the perfect words. They are looking for you to show up, being absolutely real and believable. They are seeking to believe. ~ Patrick Sweeney

Teamwork creates synergy and chemistry. We become unbreakable and believable. ~ Karen Kingsbury

It's a good question, because to be believable is the only way that you could be successful. ~ Tanya Tucker

empty promises
left lying on the tongue
of liars
false truths
spoken in tones
that made them believable
relationships are more like hell
you're just there
trying your hardest not to get burned ~ R.H. Sin

The art of cartooning is vulgarity. The only reason for cartooning to exist is to be on the edge. If you only take apart what they allow you to take apart, you're Disney. Cartooning is a low-class, for-the-public art, just like graffiti art and rap music. Vulgar but believable, that's the line I kept walking. ~ Ralph Bakshi

You have to do three things really well to make a successful film. You have to tell a compelling story that has a story that is unpredictable, that keeps people on the edge of their seat where they can't wait to see what happens next. You then populate that story with really memorable and appealing characters. And then, you put that story and those characters in a believable world, not realistic but believable for the story that you're telling. ~ John Lasseter

To be a dog woman is not necessarily to be downtrodden; that has very little to do with it. In these pictures every woman's a dog woman, not downtrodden, but powerful. To be bestial is good. It's physical. Eating, snarling, all activities to do with sensation are positive. To picture a woman as a dog is utterly believable. ~ Paula Rego

He could easily invent an elaborate, plausible universe. But it is one thing to make that universe believable, and another to believe it. That is the difference between art and religion. ~ Lawrence Wright

Creating a believable world on the ship was very important, and technically they got better and better and better at showing the ship too. ~ Patrick Stewart

To me, the difference between mythology and real history is that the real history has to tell a kind of believable story of how things happened. The physics has to work. ~ Bruno Heller

To me, you couldn't write a character like J. Edgar Hoover and have it be believable. I mean, he was a crock pot of eccentricities. We couldn't even fit all his eccentricities into [ the same named] movie. ~ Dustin Lance Black

In order for us to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves. It's not necessary that the lies be particularly believable, but merely that they be erected as barriers to truth. These barriers to truth are necessary because without them many deplorable acts would become impossibilities. Truth must at all costs be avoided. ~ Derrick Jensen

The action films I will make in the future will be more believable and character-based. I am now on my second cycle of fame, and I want to make films that smell real and are truthful. ~ Jean-Claude Van Damme

People talk about things happening and it being "unbelievable," and it's exactly the reverse. It's really believable, but we are so conditioned to believe that these kinds of things are just coincidences, that they're just things that show up arbitrarily in our lives, when the fact is that all of us have this kind of guidance available to us. ~ Wayne Dyer

We exponents of horror do much better than those Method actors. We make the unbelievable believable. More often than not, they make the believable unbelievable. ~ Vincent Price

I can't recite the chronology or elaborate on the facts. I can't explain the reasons or defend how we lived our lives. What I can tell you is how the events of 1933 sowed the seeds that fundamentally changed our future, that there was little hand-wringing or emotion, that circumstances were beyond control, that there was no recourse or appeal. I can tell you that events were incremental, that the unbelievable became the believable and, ultimately, the normal.

Ralph Webster, A Smile in One Eye: a Tear in the Other ~ Ralph Webster

With singing, the name of the game is to make yourself believable. When somebody hears you sing a song, and they say, 'Oh, that must have happened to him,' that's when you know you're transmitting. It's like being a good actor. You make people feel things, emotions and what not. ~ Ray Charles

My love for these books, at its purest, is not really about Peeta or anything silly and girly. I love that a young woman character is fierce and strong but hum in ways I find believable, relatable. Katniss is clearly a heroine, but a heroine with issues. She intrigues me because she never seems to know her own strength. She isn't blandly insecure the way girls are often forced to be in fiction. She is brave but flawed. She is a heroine, but she is also a girl who loves two boys and can't choose which boy she loves more. She is not sure she is up to the task of leading a revolution, but she does her best, even as she doubts herself.

Katniss endures the unendurable. She is damaged and it shows. At times, it might seem like her suffering is gratuitous, but life often presents unendurable circumstances people manage to survive. Only the details differ. The Hunger Games trilogy is dark and brutal, but in the end, the books also offer hope - for a better world and a better people and, for one woman, a better life, a life she can share with a man who understands her strength and doesn't expect her to compromise that strength, a man who can hold her weak places and love her through the darkest of her memories, the worst of her damage. Of course I love the Hunger Games. The trilogy offers the tempered hope that everyone who survives something unendurable hungers for. ~ Roxane Gay