I am neither a pessimist nor an optimist. I am a realist, and the reality in Iraq is that it has been very hard and it continues to be hard.
I'm not sexist, I'm just a realist.
For my part. . . I am a realist but, somehow, optimism always keeps breaking out.
The market is a pendulum that forever swings between unsustainable optimism (which makes stocks too expensive) and unjustified pessimism (which makes them too cheap). The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.
The apprentice realist uses line as a net to capture his prey, an imitation of reality. But soon he becomes enchanted with line as a thing. It becomes a servant of his pleasure.
When I use the term "complex realism", what I'm suggesting is that the writer must be realist, always realist, but not realist in the sense we have usually used the term in literature. If reality today is different from the reality of 30 years ago, we can't keep describing reality in the same way as we did 30 years ago.
Jesus is not an impractical idealist; he is the practical realist.
The word realist means nothing to me, because I would subordinate reality to temperament. Give me what is true and I applaud; but give me what is individual and alive and I applaud even more.
I don't consider myself a cynic. I think of myself as a skeptic and a realist.
An executive should be a realist; and no one is less realistic than the cynic.
I can be fairly optimistic, but I'm probably more a realist, I think. I mean, optimism's an interesting quality, isn't it, because I'm always slightly dubious as to what's behind it?
On the left is the realist tradition of the 19th century, with its impulse to social description, radical criticism and meditation on things as they are. . . culminating in Courbet at his mightiest (The Studio, The Funeral at Ornans and a portrait of a trout that has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion).
Art Education is as important for a realist artist as an Alphabet is to learn a language.
Even though I'm a realist, I try to let the medium show and allow it a certain degree of freedom.
Even in so-called realist or conventional writing there can be defamiliarization.
I am a mixture of idealist and realist.
It always felt like I had to be a realist.
I'm not an optimist. I'm a realist. And my reality is that we live in a multifaceted, multicultural world. And maybe once we stop labeling ourselves, then maybe everyone else will.
I don't consider myself a cynic. I think of myself as a skeptic and a realist. But I understand the word "cynic" has more than one meaning, and I see how I could be seen as cynical. "George, you're cynical. " Well, you know, they say if you scratch a cynic you find a disappointed idealist. And perhaps the flame still flickers a little, you know?
Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith. If the realist once believes, then he is bound by his very realism to admit the miraculous also.
