Trying Quotes - Page 597

If you try to be funny, you're not being funny.

I realize how much [Mark] Twain fabricated things. I like it very much, but it's only half true. And it shows what he was trying to do, which was just entertain. Which he does very successfully, though the humor is almost dated now.

It's kind of a little fly-on-the-wall look at these people trying to stay sane.

We always for better or worse try to put on paper what's going up on screen - whether we're directing it or not. It's really just an extension of that habit which is trying to tell the reader what the movie will look like. Ultimately that is the job of a screenwriter to a certain extent.

I am one in a row of specimens. It's when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. I'm meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive. but it's the dead me he wants. He wants me living-but-dead.

There have been times I wanted to cry on interview, but it hasn't been because that's what they're trying to conjure. No. I think you have to graduate to some higher level of TV IQ for people to actually want to see you cry.

Have you heard Alanis Morisette trying to play the harmonica? She doesn't know how to play the harmonica. Well guess what, Alanis, I INVENTED the 'don't-know-how-to-play-harmonica-harmonica-solo.'

I try to remember at least twenty to thirty things I'm grateful for every day, and I share those with at least one person that I am super grateful for.

Don't make your audience play Jeopardy. Giving your answer before asking the question puts your audience at a disadvantage. It will also reveal your biases. Make it clear what question you are trying to answer first. Then allow your audience to engage in answering the question too.

I was using them as teachers for technique but I was never trying to be a folk.

My hope is the Trump administration will approach Russia strategically, with a clear purpose of trying to find more common ground, but without giving up on fundamental values and principles that are at the core of the United States' foreign policy.

America has an ability to try to make some things happen that other countries don't necessarily have.

The agreement is fundamentally that we want to try to resolve this. The agreement is that ISIL is a threat to everybody, and we need to come together to find a way to fight ISIL. The agreement is that we want to save Syria, keep it unified, keep it secular. So surely in those very fundamental principles on which we could agree.

Believe me, I'm not going to try to get into testing.

Our thoughts, our language, are always at a distance from whatever they're trying to describe. We have other kinds of languages, like mathematics, like music, like art, but there's always that gap.

I really love James Joyce, Dubliners and other work. And I was interested in the way the dash was used in English topography - in his work particularly - and I realized there was no compulsion to use those ugly dot-dot curlicues all over the place to designate dialogue. I began to look around, and found writers who could make transitions quite clear by the language itself. I'm a bit of a maverick now. I'm always trying to push the medium.

I really try towork with an artist who is trying to create a long legacy of quality rather than trying to jump aboard a trend.

I think I've learned to be mindful. I may not have taken the time to try to understand narrative techniques, let's say, with any rigor, if I did not also have to try to explain those techniques to someone else.

While the living thing may easily be crushed by superior force, it none the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence. If it cannot do so, it does not just split into smaller pieces (at least in the higher forms of life), but loses its identity as a living thing.

If an ensemble - I don't care if it's a duet or a forty-piece orchestra - the musicians, the two of them or the forty of them, are all trying to play as tight as possible, as one person. They're trying to play like they are one person.

Search not to find things too deeply hid; Nor try to know things whose knowledge is forbid.

I don't like to say, "Oh, I don't like this kind of music." I like to listen to it and try to see what people who like it get out of it.

There's this idea that there was a point in our childhood when we were in some way better than we are now and we should try to hang on to that.

I always want to try and see what the appeal is in anything. It's the healthiest and most honest approach.

While I was in school, trying to figure out how to write an essay that could both satisfy my nonfiction workshops and still pass as something hybrid-y enough for my poetry workshops, I was looking for models, for forebears.