Ideas Quotes - Page 284

There's some connection between visual images and music. But there's plenty of old records where I have no idea what the band looked like, or even what sort of context the music was played in.

When you get the ideas, that's a thrill; when you're writing the book and it's corning out well, that's a thrill; when you finish it and other people read it, that's a thrill. There are going to be reviews, of course; not everyone's going to love it. You feel sort of naked and vulnerable in a way. That's just a minor part of the process, really. If you can't take that part, you shouldn't be in the business. But there are so many joys to writing.

On Laurence Olivier as Hamlet in a 1948 film: Olivier's idea of introspection was to hood his eyes, dentalize his consonants and let the camera circle his blondined head like a sparrow looking for a place to deposit its droppings.

Learn to listen. It's amazing the ideas that pop into your head while people are saying them into your ear.

The rock concert experience for people was really pretty stupid, you know, at the time. People would go to concerts not with the idea of listening at all.

It's a good idea to have a break, to let your mind rest and so you can start to cultivate ideas.

This drive to always want more is based on the misconceptions that having more will make me more happy, more important, and more secure, but all three ideas are untrue. Possessions only provide temporary happiness. Because things do not change, we eventually become bored with them and then want newer, bigger, better versions.

I don't believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute. The idea that the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country.

The thing about plummetting downhill at fifty miles an hour on a snack platter - if you realize it's a bad idea when you're halfway down, it's too late.

Mankiewicz was a brilliant director.

Among German historians, there's really not much debate about whether or not Hitler was a social Darwinist. He clearly was drawing on Darwinian ideas.

I like the idea of playing in unison with yourself.

The idea that laws decide what is right or wrong is mistaken in general. Laws are, at their best, an attempt to achieve justice; to say that laws define justice or ethical conduct is turning things upside down.

Just as soon as any conviction of important truth becomes central and vital, there comes the desire to utter it - a desire which is immediate and irresistible. Sacrifice is gladness, service is joy, when such an idea becomes a commanding power.

I think of an intellectual as just being bookish, being interested in history books, utopian ideas, that kind of thing.

You know how it always is, every new idea, it takes a generation or two until it becomes obvious that there's no real problem. It has not yet become obvious to me that there's no real problem. I cannot define the real problem, therefore I suspect there's no real problem, but I'm not sure there's no real problem.

Experiment is the sole judge of the validity of any idea.

It is curious how, from time immemorial, man seems to have associated the idea of evil with beauty, shrunk from it with a sort of ghostly fear, while, at the same time drawn to it by force of its hypnotic attraction.

Creation occurs when ideas and individuals collide and collude.

The intellectual ... may live for ideas, as I have said, but something must prevent him from living for one idea, from becoming obsessive or grotesque. Although there have been zealots whom we may still regard as intellectuals, zealotry is a defect of the breed and not of the essence.

The most interesting ideas definitely come at night.

Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer's a good idea.

When we started out and we were talking about the origins of the universe and the physical constants, I provided what I thought were cogent arguments against a supernatural intelligent designer. But it does seem to me to be a worthy idea.

The very idea that we get a moral compass from religion is horrible. Not only should we not get our moral compass from religion, as a matter of fact we don't.

The idea of an afterlife where you can be reunited with loved ones can be immensely consoling - though not to me.