A play, after all, is a mystery. There's no narration. And as soon as there's no narration, it's open to interpretation. It must be interpreted. You don't have a choice... Each play can become many things.
Mike NicholsRead
That seems to me the greatest American danger we're all in, that we'll bargain away the experience of being alive for the appearance of it.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote warns against sacrificing genuine experiences for superficial appearances.
Mike Nichols highlights a profound concern about contemporary life, suggesting that people often prioritize how life appears over how it is genuinely experienced. This 'bargaining away' reflects a cultural trend where the value of true fulfillment and authenticity is exchanged for the allure of outward appearances and social validation, thereby diminishing the richness of being truly alive.
Themes
ExperienceAuthenticitySuperficialityLifeBeing Alive
In practice
Example use cases
During a motivational speech about living authentically.
More from Mike Nichols
All quotes →There’s nothing better than discovering, to your own astonishment, what you’re meant to do. It’s like falling in love.
Mike NicholsRead
You could say that it's in talking movies that inner life begins to appear. You can see things happen to the faces of people that were neither planned nor rehearsed.
Mike NicholsRead
The thing about being an outsider... is that it teaches you to hear what people are thinking because you're constantly looking for the people who just don't give a damn.
Mike NicholsRead
I've learned that many of the worst things lead to the best things, that no great thing is achieved without a couple of bad, bad things on the way to them, and that the bad things that happen to you bring, in some cases, the good things.
Mike NicholsRead
Plays, especially great plays, yield their secrets over a long period of time. You can't read it three times and say, 'OK, I got it. I know what's happening.'
Mike NicholsRead
Similar quotes
Title and ancestry render a good man more illustrious, but an ill one more contemptible.
Joseph AddisonRead
A man screaming is not a dancing bear. Life is not a spectacle.
Aime CesaireRead
If the clockwork universe equated the human body with the mechanics of the clock, the digital universe now equates human consciousness with the processing of the computer. We joke that things don't compute, that we need a reboot, or that our memory has been wiped.
Douglas RushkoffRead
I am not made for politics because I am incapable of wanting or accepting the death of the adversary.
Albert CamusRead
What is the fatal charm of Italy? What do we find there that can be found nowhere else? I believe it is a certain permission to be human, which other places, other countries, lost long ago.
Erica JongRead
The more freedom is extended to business, the more prisons have to be built for those who suffer from that business.
Eduardo GaleanoRead