Quotes on Things

Of all the things you choose in life, you don't get to choose what your nightmares are. You don't pick them; they pick you.

One of the humbling things about having written more than one novel is the sense that every time you begin, that new empty page does not know who you are.

I happen to go for the simplest, most ordinary things. The extraordinary doesn't interest me. I'm not interested in psychotics. I'm interested in the person you don't expect to have a story. I like Everyman.

We're not up there in space just to joyride around. We're up there to do things that are of value to everybody right here on Earth.

The most difficult thing in the world is to reveal yourself, to express what you have to. As an artist, I feel that we must try many things - but above all we must dare to fail. You must be willing to risk everything to really express it all.

Investing is not nearly as difficult as it looks. Successful investing involves doing a few things right and avoiding serious mistakes.

I think that's what good writing is all about. You go into a genre to talk about other things. Tolkein created a whole world to talk about the world he lived in.

I write about all the horrible things that can happen to kids as a way of keeping those things from happening to mine. Write the books, spit three times over your shoulder and you're safe.

I'm one of the few women in science. I have pioneered that. One of the things I worry about is what that pioneering has done to me. I have had to fight quite hard most of the way through life.

While we celebrate our diversity, what surprises me time and time again as I travel around the constituency is that we are far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us.

One of the most important things about leadership is that you have to have the kind of humility that will allow you to be coached.

One of the things I had to really work on is, when you're the leader of an organization, people look at the expression on your face. Your mood has a lot to do with how people think the whole organization is doing.

There are people who make things happen, there are people who watch things happen, and there are people who wonder what happened. To be successful, you need to be a person who makes things happen.

It didn't matter that I wore clothes from Sears; I was still different. I looked different. My name was different. I wanted to pull away from the things that marked my parents as being different.

What religion a man holds, to what race he belongs, these things are not important; the really important thing is this knowledge: the knowledge of God's plan for men. For God has a plan, and that plan is evolution.

To some degree, we're all thinking about the same things. It's the zeitgeist. The trick, in a way, as a writer, is to hope that your interests in some sense link up with the culture around you.

What I've learned in my career as an actor is that you're only as good as your collaborators. The process is many things, but it is wholly collaborative, particularly with something like 'Westworld,' which is a 10-episode-per-season gig, and we're just now on the 7th episode.

People always say time heals. Time doesn't necessarily heal anything. It allows you to manage things. There are occasions where you feel the pain as if it just happened, but you know that it's a fleeting moment.

Toughening up, performing masculinity, pretending to enjoy things I didn't enjoy all enabled me to dodge the gender policing of the adults around me. But the way I really was - the swished hips, the Double-Dutching, the hair flips - seemed to always prevail and attract Dad's disdain.

When I was living in China, I learned to make things hyper-explicit because often they were being read by people whose command of English kept them from picking up what I thought were obvious signals.

Any actor is happy to be involved with something that's challenging, controversial, and not easily palatable. Things that are too dumbed down or easy to swallow are uninteresting... It's good when people have such a polarizing response.