A Quote by John McGahern
Among its many other obligations, fiction always has to be believable. Life does not have to suffer such constraint, and much of what takes place is believable only because it happens.
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When I play a gay character, I want to be as believable as possible. And when I'm playing a straight character, I also want to be as believable as possible. So the less that people know about my personal life, the more believable I can be as a character.
I don't think fake people living in a fake house in a fake suburb are any less dismissible or believable than a fake psychic attending a fake school in a fake town. Nothing's inherently believable about any kind of fiction, because all of it's untrue.
I've always liked the fact that fiction takes all these pretty unquantifiable human feelings and experiences and projects them onto the page in ways that make interior human sense, even when they aren't entirely believable...
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.
I don't reflect on sort of the age of the roles that I get. It's usually just what plays into what's believable - 'Am I believable at this age?'
The difference between fiction and nonfiction is that fiction must be absolutely believable.
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.
The reason that truth is stranger than fiction is that fiction has to have a rational thread running through it in order to be believable, whereas reality may be totally irrational.
We are writing fiction, but we are trying to create a world that's believable.
An actor puts himself in the hands of a director. And the director's first responsibility, obviously, is to tell the story, but the smallest thing that's not true reads on the screen. So if a director sees that an actor is not believable, he needs to help him become believable.
In creating the strange milieu in which your story takes place, you must first understand as well as you possibly can the familiar milieu in which your own life is taking place. Until you have examined and comprehended the world around you, you can't possibly create a complex and believable imaginary world.
I've always felt that no one understands why some books of non-fiction endure and some don't, because there's not much understanding among many non-fiction writers that the narrative is terribly important.
It's a good question, because to be believable is the only way that you could be successful.
You can't believe anything that's written in an historical novel, and yet the author's job is always to create a believable world that readers can enter. It's especially so, I think, for writers of historical fiction.
In the end, it's about the reality. You want something that's believable in the performances; you want something that's believable in the storytelling, in the writing. You just want to connect to something that you feel is real.
What is most important to me is that my narrator's voice is believable, and that, though it is clearly an absolute fiction, it has the emotional resonance of memoir.
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