Ideas Quotes - Page 411

I made a point of always teaching undergraduates because they are not a captive audience. . . . I always tried out my research ideas first in the classroom to get feedback from people who didn't have to listen to me if I didn't make it interesting.

The reason why Matthew Arnold, to my feeling, fails entirely as a poet (though no doubt his ideas were good - at least, I am told they were) is that he had no sense of touch whatsoever. Nothing made any impression on his skin. He could feel neither the shape nor the texture of a poem with his hands.

Who said it first? We don't know, but very often we find the same ideas attributed to two different people. All we can do is give you both. . . . The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

If you're an English actor and turn up in America, they don't have an opinion about where you sit. They have no idea what auditions to send you to, so they send you to everything.

If you worry about anyone having a go at you for having ideas, we'd still all be living in caves.

I think sometimes I get overly excited about adding things and having new ideas. You forget that more isn't always better.

We urge all people to recognize that religious freedom requires not trying to use the power of government to force religious ideas on others.

Men have as exaggerated an idea of their rights as women have of their wrongs.

Sometimes it's a good idea to think about what you want from a situation, and try to get it, rather than just blurt out the first thing that comes into your head.

Poems have ideas. The ideas of poems come out of their emotions and their emotions are carried on images.

The way in which we experience and interpret the world obviously depends very much indeed on the kind of ideas that fill our minds. If they are mainly small, weak, superficial, and incoherent, life will appear insipid , uninteresting, petty and chaotic.

evidence without ideas is more valuable than ideas without evidence.

When you consider that there are a thousand ways to express even the simplest idea, it is no wonder writers are under a great strain. Writers care greatly how a thing is said - it makes all the difference. So they are constantly faced with too many choices and must make too many decisions.

I like the Polanski stuff more than anything else. Rosemary's Baby is still one of my favorite movies of all time. The idea of her being impregnated with the devil is just so frightening.

We reject any idea that one race of people is in any way better than another.

When the idea comes, I often can't remember where it came from. I remember very little about writing the first series of Hitchhiker's. It's almost as if someone else wrote it.

A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.

The novel is about five students of classics who are studying with a classics professor, and they take the ideas of the things that they're learning from him a bit too seriously, with terrible consequences.

My mind is always racing with ideas or things I should be doing.

Most incredibly, because to me this is unbelievable, we have no idea who these [immigrants] are, where they come from. I always say Trojan Horse.

Many of our attempts to understand Christian faith have only cheapened it. I can no more understand the totality of God than the pancake I made for breakfast understands the complexity of me. The little we do understand, that grain of sand our minds are capable of grasping, those ideas such as God is good, God feels, God loves, God knows all, are enough to keep our hearts dwelling on His majesty and otherness forever.

It is difficult to keep the public interested. The public demands new wonders piled on new wonders. Often we don't know where our next marvel is coming from. The supply of strange ideas is not endless.

A novel determines its own size and shape and I've never tried to stretch an idea beyond the frame and structure it seemed to require.

If an idea seems to find its way towards a stage setting, that's the direction I take. I don't know if I'm trying to achieve anything other than to follow an idea on to the page.

Obviously the idea of being human is a very human idea.