Famous Quotes & Sayings

Robin McLeavy

When you take a character seriously, there's more room for comedy because you're not aware of how absurd you are.

Michael Leunig

Einstein was a great advocate of the notion that good ideas look absurd at the beginning. Camus expressed a similar view.

Dennis Hastert

unless the federal government adopts New Orleans as its ward and pays all its bills for the next 20 years--an unlikely to absurd proposition--the place won't be rebuilt.

Kurt Braunohler

I think we get stuck in routines so easily that when an absurd moment in life seems to be there for no reason, it wakes you up out of your everyday pattern. You pull back and look at life a little bit wider because of that one weird thing you weren't expecting.

Kurt Braunohler

I was writing this really long joke about the smell of poop, and I was like, 'What am I doing with my life?' I started to think about why I was a comedian, and then I came up with a reason for existence, which is: inserting absurdity or stupidity into strangers' lives in order to make the world a better place.

Reggie Watts

I like that feeling of discombobulation that comes in creating an absurd world that doesn't make sense. 'Monty Python' does a good job of it; 'Bugs Bunny,' too.

Lauren Willig

Like everyone else, I grew up loving the Anne books, but L.M. Montgomery is so much more. Like Jane Austen, she has an eye for the absurd and a gift for the 'mot juste.'

Stephan Pastis

It seems so absurd to get really mad with a cartoonist over a comic strip. It's sort of like getting in a fight with a circus clown outside your house. It's not going to end well.

Ken Watanabe

About half the scripts sent to me feature characters I just can't identify with, particularly one-dimensional businessmen or, if it's a comedy, some absurd 10-year-old Japanese stereotype, some role related to IT or business... There's no point in getting mad about it; it's just the way things are.

Charles Dickens

Industry is the soul of business and the keystone of prosperity.

Charles Caleb Colton

An Irish man fights before he reasons, a Scotchman reasons before he fights, an Englishman is not particular as to the order of precedence, but will do either to accommodate his customers.

Charles Dickens

Most men are individuals no longer so far as their business, its activities, or its moralities are concerned. They are not units but fractions.

Charles Dickens

The first rule of business is: Do other men for they would do you

Charles Stross

Contract law is essentially a defensive scorched-earth battleground where the constant question is, "if my business partner was possessed by a brain-eating monster from beyond spacetime tomorrow, what is the worst thing they could do to me?"

Alan Greenspan

It seems superfluous to constrain trading in some of the newer derivatives and other innovative financial contracts of the past decade. The worst have failed; investors no longer fund them and are not likely to in the future.

Alan Greenspan

...our market system depends critically on trust-trust in the word of our colleagues and trust in the word of those with whom we do business.

Alan Greenspan

What we have found over the years in the marketplace is that derivatives have been an extraordinarily useful vehicle to transfer risk from those who shouldn't be taking it to those who are willing to and are capable of doing so.

Alan Greenspan

I have found no greater satisfaction than achieving success through honest dealing and strict adherence to the view that, for you to gain, those you deal with should gain as well.

Chris Goutman

We are probably the only show in daytime that has kept characters on. We've had a number of veterans who have been on the show for over 40 years, and how they relate these veterans to their grandchildren is something I think is very real.

Max Sydow

There are characters which you spend a lot of time with, and you get to know, and you feel that -- suddenly it's a friend somewhere. And they are nice to return to.

Jim Rash

Wherever a writer grew up, they're obviously influenced by that area, and I'm sure their characters are pulled from those experiences.

Connie Willis

When you've written your characters into a corner, you just hand the manuscript over to your partner and make her fix it.

Li Bingbing

I often hear actors say during their interviews: 'I want to play a crazy person, a murderer, or someone who's on edge.' But that question scares me. I mean, of course there are characters I'd like to play, but I can't really say specifically who they are. It's much too hard to play a convincing normal person as it is.

Lee Bermejo

Who doesn't want to draw Batman or Superman? Everyone would like to be able to draw them. I've been really lucky when it comes to the characters that I get to illustrate.

Mark Billingham

When you think of a great twist or a red herring or a way of misdirecting the reader, it is good, but you know that they are just tricks at the end of the day, and the way to keep interest is to write characters that people care about.

Hayden Schlossberg

A lot of times in movies, especially in sequels, the characters become caricatures and just sort of improv machines and joke machines, rather than people you can actually connect to.

Sherwood Schwartz

When you say the name Gilligan, you know who that is. If a show is good, if it's written well, you should be able to erase the names of the characters saying the lines and still be able to know who said it. If you can't do that, the show will fail.

Nicholas Jarecki

Feature filmmaking is a different kind of complication as documentary comes in the editing room.

Michael Almereyda

Whether it would be a feature film or not I didn't know.

Rod Oden

When we began, we had him at receiver and I didn't have a guy who could tote the mail. When we moved him to tailback, I told him I was going to feature him.

Dave Adams

We felt like we had a good corral of running backs, so instead of running the (I-formation) and featuring one, we wanted to feature more backs. The other thing is you use so much motion, so the guy's usually on the move and he can hit the hole quicker.

Robert Casey

However, we might oppose it, abortion is a sad feature of modern life.

Kurtwood Smith

We did this film in 13 days, mind you. And 13 days is not very long for a feature film. Nobody in their right mind would argue that. Nobody in their right mind would do that.

Sarah Snook

We have a lot of American TV in Australia. I grew up watching 'Seinfeld,' 'The Simpsons' and those prime time TV shows over the years that feature grown-ups and high school kids. We had a saturation of American voices.

Stefan Sagmeister

People who actually tell stories, meaning people who write novels and make feature films, don't see themselves as storytellers.

Paul Pennicook

The production of the television feature by the renowned travel journalist was a solid endorsement of Jamaica's tourist industry and an affirmation of the island as a premier destination,

Charles Stross

I was Computer Shopper's linux columnist for more than half a decade, from the late 90s onwards. Yes, I know about Linux. (My first review of a Linux distro in the press was published in late 1996.)

Aiden Wilson Tozer

If I empty out half of my life, God can only fill half...God will fill as much of us as we allow Him to fill.

David R. Brower

There are many different kinds of radioactive waste and each has its own half-life so, just to be on the safe side and to simplify matters, I base my calculations on the worst one and that's plutonium.

Linda Flohr

We started slow today. In the second half we played with better intensity than we did in the first half.

Kristy Curry

We are at the turn, we are halfway around the track. It's just about respecting Michigan State and approaching like we have the other seven (Big Ten games).

Jim Mott

We struggled a little and they made it very hard to penetrate the middle. We made some adjustments at halftime and played better.

Robert Bates

We started off slow, ... but in the second half we really pulled away.

Dean Montzingo

We started each half missing a wide-open lay-up, and that kind of set the tone. My top three scorers couldn't find the basket.

Jeff Carter

We spent the whole second period in the box. It wears half the team down. We can't be doing that. It kills us.

Thomas Gould

We're going to identify students who have the potential to succeed at selective universities.

Dennis Johnson

Lucas Oil? That has no meaning to me. I can't really identify with that. I don't know what Lucas Oil is.

Frank Brunner

Let's identify where the most pressing need is now.

Elizabeth Thornton

When there is a problem, always identify and evaluate your underlying assumptions that may be contributing to the problem or preventing you from seeing the problem clearly.

Elizabeth Thornton

Objective leaders identify their unproductive mental models and tweak them for greater effectiveness.

Tom Waits

I didn't really identify with the music of my own generation, but I was very curious about the music of others.

Enrique Garcia

We are not interested in that sort of stuff. We just want to identify the baby's parents.

Idina Menzel

Who am I, if I'm not this singer with big high notes? I identify with my voice. But I'm more than just the acrobatics.

Scott Helbing

We want to identify those influencers and go to those influencers. They seem to influence people in their family, neighborhood and in the workplace.

Tao Okamoto

I started modeling with a very negative part of me - I didn't really like myself or how I looked because I was very tall for a Japanese girl.

Pam Gregory

She got to see some of the Japanese skaters doing quad jumps and triple Axels, and it got her motivated.

Makoto Watanabe

She has shown that at 36, it is not too late for a Japanese woman to get married and have a family,

Liu Jinping

Since then there's been no boycotts of Japanese products at all.

Toshihiro Wada

We are going overweight in Japanese stocks, which have a strong momentum and solid fundamentals.

Gopalakrishnan Venkataraman

We are looking at tourists as gods. If Japanese people come to India, we treat them as gods.

Shu Qi

I have a lot of Japanese fans, but in Korea they seem to go crazy for me. I don't know what it is, but they seem to like my style.

Clyde Prestowitz

I think the Japanese are in a very tough dilemma,

Tong Zeng

But most of the compensation suits have been rejected by the Japanese courts.

Alan Moore

As far as I can see, it's not important that we have free will, just as long as we have the illusion of free will to stop us going mad.

Alan Moore

On my fortieth birthday, rather than merely bore my friends by having anything as mundane as a midlife crisis I decided it might be more interesting to actually terrify them by going completely mad and declaring myself to be a magician.

Alan Moore

If you're functional, it doesn't matter if you're mad.

Alan Greenspan

If I've made myself clear, I've misspoken.

Chris Bauer

Every angle that I looked at was somebody who I admired and was better than me. So it made me very afraid.

Dave Barry

At the time, we were mad at Moammar Gadhafi, which resulted in us bombing all over Libya and killing a bunch of people, but not him. Then Ronald Reagan gets up and says we're not trying to kill him, we're just dropping bombs. You can kill all the Libyans you want, but legally you can't try to kill the leader.

Cary Grant

I'd like to have made one of those big splashy Technicolor musicals with Rita Hayworth.

Camille Paglia

Repression is an evolutionary adaptation permitting us to function under the burden of our expanded consciousness. For what we are conscious of could drive us mad.

William Shakespeare

Many that are not mad have, sure, more lack of reason.

Satya Pradhuman

The point is, we're not out of the woods yet,

Michael Vickers

The point is to stop it (illegal immigration), and if we have to do it ourselves, we're going to do everything we can to stop it.

Craig Martin

The point is to get it right, not necessarily to get it done early.

Father Thomas

The point is that we are not at a place yet where we can say one way or the other.

Livan Hernandez

The point is, it's now or never. You try to make the playoffs.

Jan Egeland

The point here is it could have been avoided. It didn't have to reach these proportions.

Jim Clarke

We are at the point where we have succeeded in accomplishing what we wanted to do.

Tom Renney

We have to get to the point where he thinks he could play, and I don't think we're at that point.

Michael Ondaatje

You're getting everyone's point of view at the same time, which, for me, is the perfect state for a novel: a cubist state, the cubist novel.

Alanis Morissette

Anything I do has to be directly related to my music. If it isn't, I don't really see a point to it.

Chaka Khan

If we could just see how related we all are, how we're really all in the same place.

Kiesza

It wasn't until I wrote 'Hideaway' that I found the song I related to as an artist.

Tibby Johnston

Most stories are related to respect. So they know that we need to respect everything.

Lars Peter Hansen

I view the work I've done related to statistics and economics as, roughly speaking, how to do something without having to do everything.

Edward Hirsch

Rhythm is sound in motion. It is related to the pulse, the heartbeat, the way we breathe. It rises and falls. It takes us into ourselves; it takes us out of ourselves.

Anwar Robinson

Everything I do is music-related.

Damian Marley

Everyone is related to Africa; everyone comes from Africa. We are all distant relatives.

Amiri Baraka

You can't be an American without being related to other Americans.

Alan Watts

The role of the Guru is to show the person that he already has what he is looking for.

Alan Autry

I am convinced that your Mayor must take the leadership role in education too.

Chris Burke

I'd like to be the role model to teach other people who have Down's syndrome to be actors and actresses and to be themselves and not try to be a big shot.

Chloe Grace Moretz

You go up for hundreds, thousands of roles, and you get told no, no, no, so many times.

Chip Conley

Companies and leaders are role models - not just with the business community - but in the broader world.

Catherine Deneuve

I choose my roles carefully.

Cary Elwes

I take away something from every role.

Cary Elwes

I take away something from every role. I'm still learning and that's what life is about.

Caroline Kennedy

Well, the role of money in politics is pretty corrupting right now.

Al Pacino

Show me a bad script and I will show you a big payday.

Chloe Grace Moretz

My mum reads every script before I go for it.

David Puttnam

I've always sensed what a script should sound like - even before the movie's been made

Lauren Miller

I went to film school, worked as an assistant, and wrote several scripts that haven't gotten made.

Bob Newhart

I don't have a stack of scripts.

David Twohy

After I script the movie, I have to storyboard it out, I have to budget it, and I have to understand if I can afford all those visual effects or not.

David Duchovny

It's hard to find scripts that know what they are from page one to page 115.

Audrey Tautou

I've received some English-speaking scripts, but I was not interested in them.

Denzel Washington

I've been fortunate. I don't pick scripts. Scripts pick me.

Nigel Barker

My daughter's first sentence was, 'Dada no hair.' And I was, like, 'No Jasmine, Dada does have hair, Dada just shaves his head.'

David Hume

Accuracy is, in every case, advantageous to beauty, and just reasoning to delicate sentiment. In vain would we exalt the one by depreciating the other.

Jason Calacanis

I don't want someone taking half a sentence or paraphrasing me... Just too much risk.

Jane Jacobs

Sentimentality about nature denatures everything it touches.

Jose Rizal

Orientals, and the Malays in particular, are a sensitive people: delicacy of sentiment is predominant with them.

Blaise Pascal

All our reasoning boils down to yielding to sentiment.

Mark Johnson

She sent a laser in there. You look for breaks, you look for bounces, and we got one on that first goal.

Bill Cosby

Most of us learn to read by looking at each word in a sentence - one at a time.

Colleen Hoover

When I sat down and wrote the first paragraph, I was like, 'Oh, I can go with this.' I didn't do an outline. I didn't do anything. I just wrote sentence by sentence, not knowing where the story was going.