Ideas Quotes - Page 574

When I did the album for 'When Harry Met Sally,' I found myself out there in front of this big band, which I had no idea how to do, and they wiped the floor with me. It's a very specific skill, and I didn't know how to do it.

I had the idea that the film would be much better served by a Branch Rickey lookalike than a Harrison Ford lookalike. I didn't want the audience to go into the film thinking that they knew me from some previous experience in a movie.

I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, so nothing of what I was studying seemed to fit. I know now that I should have taken advantage of that time and that I missed a great deal of the opportunity to educate myself.

My operas usually come from musical ideas rather than ideas about subject matter.

There are rhythmic ideas which sometimes only work up to a point. In writing there are moments when it just comes off the page, it's not just a collection of notes.

When once experience taught me that I could work when I chose, and within a quarter of an hour of my determining to do so, I was relieved, in a great measure, from those embarrassments and depressions which I see afflicting many an author who waits for a mood instead of summoning it, and is the sport, instead of the master, of his own impressions and ideas.

We do not claim that punning is legitimate wit. Wit consists in combination of ideas, punning in combination of words only. We wonder at the one, but we laugh at the drollery of the other - as the world goes a pun is regarded as an imponderable commodity, all know the rank it holds in the order of pure intellect.

Whatever offices of life are performed by women of culture and refinement are thenceforth elevated; they cease to be mere servile toils, and become expressions of the ideas of superior beings.

I've been writing as long as I've been able to form words. I never wrote with an idea of publishing anything until I began working on '[To Kill a] Mockingbird'. I think that what went before may have been a rather subconscious form of learning how to write, of training myself.

I didn't know how you were going to do it, but from now on I'll never worry about what'll become of you, son, you'll always have an idea.

I loved writing and performing, but the idea of doing it for a living seemed so remote. But I eventually let it devolve to the point where it was the only thing I could do.

A friend of mine is trying to do a documentary where he brings Jewish and Arab comedians to occupied territories in Israel. He wants to do shows as a way of finding some comedic common denominator. When he proposed the idea to one of the officials at the Jenin refuge camp, the guy just stared at him and said, "This is not a joke to us. We don't think that laughing is the answer."

The idea of Herman Melville in a writing class is always distressing to me.

The preparation for building a series of thrillers based on a single character is kind of like the preparation for becoming a parent: The best part is the idea - wink, wink.

You know, people call mystery novels or thrillers 'puzzles.' I never understood that, because when I buy a puzzle, I already know what it is. It's on the box. And even if I don't, if it's a 5,000-piece puzzle of the 'Mona Lisa', it's not like I put the last piece in and go, 'I had no idea it's the 'Mona Lisa'!'

A thought functions only as a fragmentary part in the formulation of an idea.

This is not what I thought physics was about when I started out: I learned that the idea is to explain nature in terms of clearly understood mathematical laws; but perhaps comparisons are the best we can hope for.

The more you progress, the more you learn. I try to pay attention to ticket counts, draws, guarantees and bonuses. I look at my deals closely these days and try to come up with other projects and ideas, since this business [comedy] is about creating content.

In life, new thoughts and ideas always clash with the old world order and habits.

I love filmmaking because it's like harvesting as a farmer. I have an idea, I get the financing, I write the script and then cast and shoot and edit. Then there is opening night, and after that I get another idea.

A fervently believed idea, even if wrong, dies hard.

A lot of young black people in America, and even in Africa and Brazil, would say that they are telling their story, but most of the films are like application forms with the formulaic ideas of Hollywood.

It's not a bad idea to call this Cthulhuism & Yog-Sothothery of mine "The Mythology of Hastur" - although it was really from Machen & Dunsany & others, rather than through the Bierce-Chambers line, that I picked up my gradually developing hash of theogony - or daimonogony. Come to think of it, I guess I sling this stuff more as Chambers does than as Machen & Dunsany do - though I had written a good deal of it before I ever suspected that Chambers ever wrote a weird story!

Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.

It seems to me that a great university ought to have room in it for men subscribing to every sort of idea that is currently prevalent