Sidney Lumet (Sidney Arthur Lumet) Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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Realism hasn't fallen out of favor with most people, who are interested in people's lives rather than gymnastics of style or literary trends. It's a certain kind of academic who undervalues realism, largely because it is not amenable to endless exegesis.
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How accurately can the law fix the crime? There has to be a mechanism for very fast action. The law is like this: catch them and punish them.
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My family weren't actors, and we didn't know any actors. It wasn't even something I was aware you could do as a job. I thought you had to be a Redgrave or a Barrymore before you were allowed to go to drama school.
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There are a few players who don't like to think about the game.
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I do not cook.
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There is a simple rule here, a rule of legislation, a rule of business, a rule of life: beyond a certain point, complexity is fraud. You can apply that rule to left-wing social programs, but you can also apply that rule to credit derivatives, hedge funds, all the rest of it.
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My song-writing has always been just about my life - usually my worst moments.
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Our priorities are out of whack. We spend too much to protect birds and fish at the expense of people.
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Ding-dong, the wicked witch is dead.
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The thing that's going to make artificial intelligence so powerful is its ability to learn, and the way AI learns is to look at human culture.
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I am so lucky that throughout my career I've been able to play such different characters.
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My military service is the thing I'm most proud of, but when I think of everything happening in the Middle East, I can't help but tell myself I wish we would have achieved some sort of lasting victory. No one touched that subject before Trump, especially not in the Republican Party.
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War zones are dangerous, protests can be violent, also, natural disasters are difficult to cover, so there are going to be risks.
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I think for anyone - male or female - in improv, the biggest thing to get over is the fear. I think every improviser has that.
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I think the song itself, 'Smoke and Fire,' is just a metaphor for the feelings that you feel in a relationship.
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In retrospect, the most unnerving aspect of being openly gay was that it turned out to be as disappointingly normal as being straight.
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I don't really have any faith in anybody enjoying photographs in a large enough sense to matter. I think it's all about finances, on one side.
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My ideas for the next collection always happen a couple of months before the show. I have learned to shut up and not bother my assistants with it.
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Forget the career, do the work. If you feel what you are doing is on line and you're going someplace and you have a vision and you stay with it, eventually things will happen.
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Sometimes you put things off. And you get addicted to putting things off.
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I don't think paper will go away. I do believe that the value of paper will change, and Xerox is working on changing that value. Consider a color page. Actual life is in color, but you keep reproducing it in black and white. You remove value. It's a bad thing to do.
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All great work is preparing yourself for the accident to happen.
