“Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.”
Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) British filmmaker
Picture Parade, BBC (5 July 1960)
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Clive James151
Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator an… 1939–2019Related quotes
“The dullness of fact is the mother of fiction.”
Isaac Asimov book Fact and Fancy
Fact and Fancy (1962), p. 11
General sources
“History is bright and fiction dull with homely men who have charmed women.”
O. Henry book Roads of Destiny
"Next to Reading Matter"
Roads of Destiny (1909)
Charles de Lint (1951) author
"Where Desert Spirits Crowd the Night", p. 289
The Ivory and the Horn (1996)
Edwin Boring (1886–1968) American psychologist
Source: "A history of introspection." 1953, p. 174; As cited in: Danziger (1980;257)
Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist
“Morality and literature,” pp. 161-162
On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God (1968)
Context: It is not only in literature that fiction generates immorality. It does it also in life itself. For the substance of our life is almost exclusively composed of fiction. We fictionalize our future, and, unless we are heroically devoted to truth, we fictionalize our past, refashioning it to our taste. We do not study other people; we invent what they are thinking, saying, and doing. Reality provides us with some raw material, just as novelists often take a theme from a news item, but we envelop it in a fog in which, as in all fiction, values are reversed, so that evil is attractive and good is tedious.
Sarah Caudwell (1939–2000) English barrister and writer