Quote collection
304 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"What we do as a community, as a society, for each other, matters as much as what we do for ourselves. It sounds a little trite, but there's a powerful amount of truth in that, I think."
"My point is that the great challenge of an artist is to balance those two things: to be strong enough to have your own personal vision that you will put on the page or the canvas or the screen, no matter what people say, but it requires a radical sensitivity. You have to be completely open to what the world is telling you, to what your audience tells you. And balancing those two things is nearly impossible."
"Television allows the audience to argue with the creator in a way you don't in a movie."
"If we think about emotion this way - as outside-in, not inside out - it is possible to understand how some people can have an enormous amount of influence over others. Some of us, after all, are very good at expressiing emotions and feelings, which means that we are far more emotionally contagious than the rest of us."
"We can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't."
"Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig."
"It is the new and different that is always most vulnerable to market research."
"The best example of how impossible it will be for Major League Baseball to crack down on steroids is the fact that baseball and the media are still talking about the problem as "steroids."
"The trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story."
"There are exceptional people out there who are capable of starting epidemics. All you have to do is find them."
"Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push - in just the right place - it can be tipped."
"Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do."
"Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action."
"You can learn as much - or more - from one glance at a private space as you can from hours of exposure to a public face."
"Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness."
"A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading."
"You don't start at the top if you want to find the story. You start in the middle, because it's the people in the middle who do the actual work in the world."
"I became convinced that knowing lots of people was kind of skill, something that the diligent can overcome."
"My earliest memories of my father are of seeing him work at his desk and realizing that he was happy. I did not know it then, but that was one of the most precious gifts a father can give his child."
"The answer is that the success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts."