Ideas Quotes - Page 465

I have very, very specific ideas about how I want to do my work and how I want to be perceived and to the point of ridiculousness sometimes.

No, not really. I mean, at the end of the day, it's just a part. You just go into it, and like your life, you're walking along the street, as a really bad analogy, you step on a little stone, and it just kind of flies away and you have no idea where it's going. And then you are just trying not to drown afterwards. And that's my life. See, that was really terrible.

Your ideas dry up sometimes, and you get lazy sometimes 'cause you're around the same people. That was the good thing about having different directors. You had to stay on your toes.

If I do decide one day to stop acting, I just hate the idea of people going: 'Oh, did you ever do anything else besides that Twilight thing?'

I still had the same frustration with trying to play [Edward Cullen], the entire way through, right up until the last shot. It's a strange part because, on the one hand, a lot of the audience projects their idea of Edward[Cullen] onto him. It doesn't matter what he is. They want him to be a certain way. And then, my instincts were to try and play it and to try to find the fallibility in him and the weaknesses.

I used to be able to be in England and just be fine. No one had any idea who I was.I get a lot more abuse in England.

An impractical man--which he not only seems to be, but really is--will always be unreliable and unpredictable in his dealings with others. He will engage in actions that mean something else to him than to others, but he is at peace with himself about everything as long as he can make it all come together in a fine idea.

The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new.

People think you get one idea for a cartoon every week, and that's not the way it works. You usually get 10 or 15, and you're - certainly when I was a cartoonist, before I was a cartoon editor, you're rushing to do what is called the batch. When I was doing that, I liked to have, in general, about 10 cartoons.

Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, or mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn't a human invention.

If you don't generalize you don't philosophize.

I made a body of work, which was like trying to make movies on a wall and was made up of all different images and materials. I had the aspiration to make movies because I thought that was the cycle. I had this insane egomaniac idea that I could make movies because I made these gigantic art projects.

It will help erase the idea that politics is a second-rate profession and a dirty business.

Many of us had this idea of doing independent film, of making personal, relevant films, as opposed to Hollywood fluff. I directed a few.

One of the things that really bothers me is that Americans don't have any sense of history. The majority of Americans don't have any idea of where we've come from, so they naturally succumb to the kind of cliche version that Ronald Reagan represented.

These?" Mat said, gesturing to his coat and shirt. "I really have no idea. They were just down there. I'm completely baffled." He had been very pleased to learn that Seanchan guards-for all their stoic expressions and too-straight backs-responded to bribes like other people.

Juilin," she asked hesitantly, "what were you going to do with the salt and cooking oil? Not exactly," she added more quickly. "Just a general idea." He looked at her for a moment. "I do not know. But they did not, either. That is the trick of it; their minds made up worse then I ever could. I have seen a tough man break when I sent for a basket of figs and some mice.

This idea that clumsy, stumbling people are real bright is ridiculous, because intelligence is related to neurologic function, and really intelligent people are very well-coordinated.

Paul Levinson has outdone himself: The Plot to Save Socrates is a philosophically rich gem full of big ideas and wonderful time-travel tricks.

Perhaps whatever there is in my work that may be really interesting to others and surely what is interesting to me, is the result of a sometimes successful effort to free myself from any idea that what I produce must be art.

Count on big lines to express your ideas.

All good management is the expression of one great idea

[Osip] Mandelstam, who wasn't a political thinker, loved the idea of the city-state. One of the emblems in his poetry of the politics he imagined, over and against the universalizing politics of [Carl] Marx, was the medieval city of Novgorod, which had in its center a public well where the water was free to everyone. That became for him a figure of justice.

At some level, you have to be able to say, "This is my task." It's in small, local ways that you keep yourself alive and refresh ideas that are always going into dead abstraction.

It's the same with this idea of a literate public, and also of a democracy in which people have access to and really read the best books. It turns out that even when you create this kind of environment, maybe only 10 percent of the people want to read those books.