“Keep in mind that a language is both a map of the world and its own world, with its own shadowlands and crevasses - places where statements that seem to obey all the language's rules are nevertheless impossible to deal with.”
Thoughtful feeling
Thoughtful Quotes — page 203 of 303
“I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it.”
“We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life "outside" the story changes the story.”
“When I say or write something, there are actually a whole lot of different things I am communicating. The propositional content (i.e., the verbal information I'm trying to convey) is only one part of it. Another part is stuff about me, the communicator. Everyone knows this. It's a function of the fact there are so many different well-formed ways to say the same basic thing, from e.g. "I was attacked by a bear!" to "Goddamn bear tried to kill me!" to "That ursine juggernaut did essay to sup upon my person!" and so on.”
“That as people age, accumulate more and more private experiences, their sense of history tightens, narrows, becomes more personal? So that to the extent that they remember events of social importance, they remember only for example 'where they were' when such-and-such occurred. Et cetera et cetera. Objective events and data become naturally more and more subjectively colored.”
“I tend to think of fiction as being mainly about characters and human beings and inner experience, whereas essays can be much more expository and didactic and more about subjects or ideas.”
“If some people read my fiction and see it as fundamentally about philosophical ideas, what it probably means is that these are pieces where the characters are not as alive and interesting as I meant them to be.”
“I've noticed that, while I can't help but respect and sort of envy the moral nerve of people who truly do not care what others think of them, people like this also make me nervous, and I tend to do my admiring from a safe distance.”
“I don’t really mean what I’m saying.”
“It's absolutely of no importance who or what V was under the mask. He isn't a who or a what, he's an idea. The thing is, you couldn't continue it. Now and then the idea of a sequel has been raised, in vague forms, but I think it would be a bad idea. The story's finished.”
“I'm interested in why people compromise when they shouldn't. It comes back to what V's about in a sense. We've all got ideals, but given the right circumstances, we'll forget about them and put them behind us. I'm very interested in why people do that.”
“It's always good to find out what you don't want to do.”
“You want people to identify with the person on the screen or in the theater, but you don't want them to identify with you as a person.”
“While I think storytelling is a meaningful way to spend your life... it does feel a little bit secondary or off-point.”
“That's what we were interested in: how power and money ran itself, much more so than 'drugs are bad, drugs are good.' That seems to me a simple moral equation and one you don't have to spend 60 hours of television examining. And I think the same thing is true with how we approached pornography or prostitution. Prostitution's been around since the Bible, and pornography's been around since about 15 minutes after the French guy invented the first camera.”
“You can't make a good show based on pure verisimilitude, pure anti-drama. But you have to acknowledge a lot of ordinary life. Most TV doesn't do that.”
“Before we have children, we think most of the parents sitting in sacrament meeting ought to “do something about their kids.” Once we have kids, we think everyone ought to be a lot more understanding about what we’re trying to survive during the meeting. And once our kids are grown, we think, “I never let my kids get away with that.” We really all need to chill out.”
“Write down how you really feel, not how you wish you felt or how you think you should feel, but how you really feel. Don't try to change it. Honor it: "This is how I feel." Express it, and then it's not suppressed and stored somewhere in your liver or somewhere else.”
“One of the first things I do with people is help them figure out what their limiting beliefs are and then encourage them to question, "Well, do I really want to keep that one? Is it limiting me? Does it not fit me? Is it holding me back?"”
“That requires quite an imaginative leap because it's hard for me to imagine that my biography would be of much interest to anyone, and because I'm a fairly private person, the notion doesn't appeal to me.”