Willing Suspension of Disbelief/Quotes

"It was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to translate our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procedure for these shadows of imagination willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith."

—William Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria

"There's Suspension Of Disbelief and then there's insulting my fucking intelligence."

—The Spoony One on the Wing Commmander movie

"Suspension Of Disbelief doesn't throw away all logic. It just allows me to believe that there are people that can run really fast or aliens that can shapeshift living among humans."

—Linkara, Atop the Fourth Wall

"At a certain point, it's just a deal between the director and the audience where he basically pauses the movie and says, "Look, if you want to see some more cool action scenes, just initial here that it's OK that the alien computers run on MacOS for some reason." And you go, "OK," and he goes back to blowing things up for you."

—Cracked, "6 Groups Who Don't Work as Movie Bad Guys Anymore"

"Nor need their strange worlds, when we get there, be at all tied to scientific probabilities. It is the wonder, or beauty, or suggestiveness that matters. When I myself put canals on Mars, I believe I already knew that telescopes had dissipated that old optical illusion. The point was that they were part of the Martian myth as it existed in the common mind."

—CS Lewis,On Science Fiction

Ed Wood: What do you know? Haven't you heard of suspension of disbelief?

—Ed Wood

"I know you’re meant to suspend your disbelief in a horror film about what is survivable and for how long, but watching a man with a gushing head wound – i.e. a knife straight into the brain – stumble around for a while and still have the mental capacity to utter “fuck you Bruce Willis” before he falls down dead is the point where I say “fuck you movie.”"

—Critical Dave, Scream 4: The Good, The Bad and The Meta

There’s a difference between suspension of disbelief and hanging it by the neck ’till dead, and Wolf is getting perilously close to the latter.

—Klytus Soothsayer, Blade Bunny forums

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.

—Mark Twain

"[The story-maker] makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is "true"; it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside."

—J.R.R. Tolkien

It's just you and the audience - hundreds of people - and you've got just one chance, just once chance, to convince them that it's real. There's a magic moment where you can make them believe anything because they already want to. They're there and ready and you just have to take them the rest of the way.

—Ben Cato, The Dreamer

"I'm not having anyone staring in disbelief at my willing suspension!

—Captain Blackadder

Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.

—Aristotle