I think I was so grateful, in the years after Sleater-Kinney broke up or went on hiatus or whatever you want to call it, to find 'Portlandia' and co-create 'Portlandia' with Fred Armisen, which allows for levity, allows for the same kind of kinetic energy, but channeled through absurdity and surrealism.

Carrie Brownstein

I never understood the realism of an imaginary circumstance. While I was doing 'Smoke Signals,' I relied on my instinct and what I grew up with. I had this energy, but it was a one-dimensional thing.

Adam Beach

'Heroes', 'Desperate Housewives', 'The Sopranos' - they're all very stylised. 'The Wire' is much more rooted in realism and honesty. In American television, I can't think of anything I'd rather have been in because it has got something to say and that is the kind of thing I want to do.

Aidan Gillen

I have always loved magic realism as a form of writing. I have also been fascinated for a long time with the intersection of science and religion.

Alan Lightman

Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.

Aldous Huxley

When I was an adolescent, I abandoned my country at 23 years to come to Paris to know Andre Breton, the 'Pope of Surrealism.' And for three years, I was there working with him being a surrealist.

Alejandro Jodorowsky

For me, surrealism is in my blood; it's not an effort.

Alejandro Jodorowsky

Surrealism was necessary - essential, even - in the 1920s to bridge the gap between rationalism and the subconscious. It started something important. But by the early '60s, it had become petit-bourgeois; it was too intellectual and romantic, and had ground to a halt. It had become respectable.

Alejandro Jodorowsky

Surrealism - in particular with Salvador Dali - was all about ego. It was all about extreme individualism.

Alejandro Jodorowsky

The end of the surrealism movement was so political, so artistically pure.

Alejandro Jodorowsky

'War and Peace' holds a strange place in literary history, participating in the crowning of realism as a substantial and serious literary mode in America, even as the novel also contributed to the argument that historical fiction could be by nature dangerous, illegitimate, and inaccurate.

Alexander Chee

Hawthorne has given us a tradition that some people refer to as Yankee Magic Realism, and I do think there is a certain quality to the landscape that definitely leads into the dark woods.

Alice Hoffman

Well, I am a Malayali and I know the kind of expectations my fans have about my films. That, for me, is the biggest award. So I try and pick roles that I hope viewers will like. Malayalis want actors to be subtle in their acting and they enjoy realism.

Amala Paul

For years, in the wake of Rushdie, I had imagined magical realism to be the last refuge of the non-resident Indian.

Amitava Kumar

My mother learned that she was carrying me at about the same time the Second World War was declared; with the family talent for magic realism, she once told me she had been to the doctor's on the very day.

Angela Carter

I'm a huge fan of Italian new realism, work by directors like Fellini and Vittorio De Sica. Their image of women is so beautiful.

Anna Mouglalis

I definitely don't think of myself as someone identified by region. It's too far-flung a region, for starters, and southern New Mexico is very isolated. I wouldn't think of my identity as generational, either, but maybe as more stylistic, in the school of realism and domestic issues.

Antonya Nelson

I like my films to have a certain amount of realism - something that's thought provoking and intelligently written. More than the amount on the pay cheque, I look for a level of respectability as an actor.

Arjun Rampal

Each time I'm starting to work on a film, even if I love to settle the plot in the real world, I start to think about the plot as a fairy tale, or a dream, or a nightmare... As if it was the best way to tell the truth about characters or narration, instead of realism.

Arnaud Desplechin

In the early 1990s we witnessed the emergence of a revitalized contemporary Chinese art world that began as a reaction against the government-approved Social Realist style. Zhang Xiaogang, Huang Yong Ping, Ai WeiWei, Yue Minjun, and Wang Guangyi were among the first group of artists to establish a movement that became known as Cynical Realism.

Arne Glimcher

I felt the most intense pleasure in piercing the stone in order to make an abstract form and space; quite a different sensation from that of doing it for the purpose of realism.

Barbara Hepworth