Margaret Heffernan Quotes
A great deal of creativity is about pattern recognition, and what you need to discern patterns is tons of data. Your mind collects that data by taking note of random details and anomalies easily seen every day: quirks and changes that, eventually, add up to insights.
Quotes to Explore
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Help the man-in-the-street make sense of the bewildering.
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It is absolutely impossible to settle the debts to pensioners, teachers, and others. The country hasn't got enough money to do so.
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The Supreme Court is not elected, and it is therefore not a proper arbiter of social policy.
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Never regret yesterday. Life is in you today and you make your tomorrow.
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I live in the suburbs, the final battleground of the American dream, where people get married and have kids and try to scratch out a happy life for themselves.
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As a mom, you do what you have to do without even thinking about it.
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I'm getting married because I'm in love with a girl and want to spend my life with her. You can't live your life doing what other people want you to or you'll be miserable. At some point you just have to be yourself.
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I don't know that I'll ever get to make my ideal film, because Frank Capra is dead.
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When you argue with your inferiors, you convince them of only one thing: they are as clever as you.
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Sometimes, I find that just the simplest, cleanest things that are intelligently performed are funniest to me.
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I feel like God gave me the ability to play a game. I try to take it very seriously. I realize it's just a game.
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All of a sudden I discovered that I'm allergic to caviar. It was the perfect metaphor for my life. When I was only able to afford bad caviar, I could certainly eat my fill of it.
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Vatican II was a force that seized the mind of the Roman Catholic Church and carried it across centuries from the 13th to the 20th.
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In previous generations, there was purpose; you had to die, but there was God, and literature and culture would go on. Now, there is no God, and our species is imminently doomed, so there is no purpose. We get up, raise families, have bank accounts, fix our teeth and everything else. But really, there is utterly no purpose except to be alive.
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I am a big music nerd.
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Nobody in France would ever say 'He's a Jewish novelist' or 'She's a black novelist,' even though people do write about those subjects. It would look absurd to a French person to go into a bookstore and see a 'Gay Studies' section.
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The theatre only knows what it's doing next week, not like the opera, where they say: What are we going to do in five years' time? A completely different attitude.
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Everyone around me was super-cool and laid back and skinny and tan and volleyball-y, and I was just this neurotic kid who was singing 'Annie Get Your Gun.'
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I like to buy a new fragrance for each film. I'll go out in the city where I'm filming and snap it up. The one I have for 'Into the Woods' is Terry de Gunzburg Flagrant Delice, which I bought in London.
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In novels, and American novels in particular, it's not just about redemption, it's about forward movement and healing oneself. Americans are very big on getting better.
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The corporation is one of the great unheralded human inventions of destruction. It is a way to absolve from any personal liability a bunch of people. They form together in a massive ID and they do whatever they want.
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Writers who aren't from rural states in the Midwest or the West often treat such people as if they were the Waltons or the Beverly Hillbillies.
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I'm saying those things here and now out of a belief in the State of Israel's immense power and the immeasurable courage of its soldiers, military leaders, and security forces to hit any enemy and defeat any terrorist. Out of this sense of strength we must act with all our power in order to create hope for a different life for our young generation and that of our Palestinian neighbors.
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A great deal of creativity is about pattern recognition, and what you need to discern patterns is tons of data. Your mind collects that data by taking note of random details and anomalies easily seen every day: quirks and changes that, eventually, add up to insights.
