Numbers Quotes - Page 197

I had a number of different labels. A lot of people assumed I was gay because I was wearing a man's suit, and one had to learn that it's OK, people will do that, and you don't always have to explain it one hundred percent, because they're never going to accept what your own interpretation is. It's all illusory.

My writing day has grown shorter as I've aged, although it seems to produce the same number of pages.

There were a number of particularly delightful incidents. There is, for example, the physicist who introduced me to one of my favorite laws, which he described as Murphys law or the fourth law of thermodynamics (actually there were only three last I heard) which states: If anything can go wrong it will.

The creative process is probably closest to problem solving, but it differs from it in a number of ways. In problem solving the immediate goal is a specific one ... in the creative process there is no such clear goal.

I would have played street cop number three if it meant getting to work with Chris Nolan.

Hollywood is still the cradle of many myths, including the one of eternal youth. I find it odd that the very notion of desire, when applied to a woman over 40, is turned into a pathology or a mockery in a number of films. But Hollywood is not the only place to blame, by far. This is just a rendition, possibly magnified by the power of movies, of a general state of things, social, cultural and political.

In terms of fiction, there are a number of writers who are thinking about the future of the environment whose work complements mine. Kim Stanley Robinson's novel 2312 is a great example, as is Tobias Buckell's novel Arctic Rising.

I never think about issues when I'm working on a novel. Issues are things that happen to people in sufficient numbers to elicit widespread attention; in other words, they're just life happening. That's what I think about: life, and telling a story.

More than a decade after our fellow citizens began bedding down on the sidewalks, their problems continue to seem so intractable that we have begun to do psychologically what government has been incapable of doing programmatically. We bring the numbers down--not by solving the problem, but by deciding it's their own damn fault.

Everyone is skeptical. Only the media are not skeptical, but, then, they were also not skeptical when the administration put out the line that coordinated embassy attacks around the globe on the anniversary of 9/11 were just rowdy movie reviews. Numbers on a TV screen won't prevent millions of Americans from noticing that they're unemployed.

there is that wish, in the name of democracy, to level down, because high cultural standards are despised and rejected, and even feared, in our Western Democracies. Don't let anyone else have what I've not got, or can't enjoy! - is the secret theory. A very large number of writers in the British and American popular press profess to be preaching democracy when in fact they are only trying to make envy respectable!

Numbers are the most certain things we have.

He very nearly stole a scene in my movie, and I didn't call him on it because I was just like, Hey, I saw some stuff on SuperDeluxe and how many different films do you have on there? And he goes, This one, this one, Comedy by Numbers and this one and one called 'Bob Pitches a Movie.' And I'm like, Oh! And then I was thinking he would say, which is very similar to the one to the one I did in your movie, but he never did. I just let it go. I don't care.

Man's natural life span, 75 to 90 years or so, has not increased. It is the number of us who manage to attain it that has increased.

As you get older and as your situation changes, it becomes different. Yes, I have to provide for my family, so if there's a chance that I'm not going to be able to provide for my family, who is always number one, my kids are always number one, then yeah, maybe it's not the same. But like I said, everybody's boiling point is different and you get to that point differently and you're at peace with it.

This whole theory [of John Law and Jean Terrasson], as dear to French financial schemers in the eighteenth century as to American "Greenbackers" in the nineteenth, had resulted, under the Orleans Regency and Louis XV, in ruin to France financially and morally, had culminated in the utter destruction of all prosperity, the rooting out of great numbers of the most important industries, and the grinding down of the working people even to starvation.

I know that a ridiculous number of classic serials have been commissioned, and that reviews show a reaction against them. The critics seem fed up.

We may be smaller, we may be small in number, we may have a lot less money, but there are a growing number of people who are sick and tired of the campaigns to destroy decent people, such as George Bush, Sarah Palin, Clarence Thomas, Paula Jones, Linda Tripp, Matt Drudge, Rush Limbaugh.

I just pay attention to what's in my head. That's my number-one rule.

One of the tours we had scheduled - the gaslight tour of Jack the Ripper's haunts, and on Halloween, no less, was canceled at the last minute. I recommend making sure you know the numbers of your tours and destinations so you can confirm your schedule along the way. Also, though we laugh about it now, the Eiffel Tower was on strike so we couldn't go up!

Your diet has to be number one. If you don't eat the right things, it doesn't matter who you are. Sometimes those foods treat people differently.

The toughest individual I've ever met in my life is Jim Kelly, No. 12.

I think some people see those three numbers 9/ 11 and they walk away. That might be changing now. People are more willing to step into an artistic exploration of that subject. All you can do is let it go

To me, the psychology behind the character is critical. So I work very hard to get into the mind of the man that I'm going to be playing, because number one, I want to understand why he's doing what he's doing. It's essential, it's absolutely essential.

If you're ranked number one in the world it's because you've earned it, and I think the only way to really get there is to have that ability and to have it nurtured in a very competitive environment at an early age.