Patrick Marber Quotes

Every trick is an old one, but with a change of players, a change of dress, it comes out as new as before.

The key to why things change is the key to everything.

To me, everything is endless variations on other things. Like waves in the ocean. They continue to turn over on each other, and they're all slightly different. I don't know if originality is possible. Is it even necessary? Because everything is different than what came before, but it's all branches from the same tree. Originality is overrated, but what you do with things is always different.

I have been interested in phenomena involving complexity, diversity and evolution since I was a young boy.

You can't just play the same thing, over and over again.

Change begets change as much as repetition reinforces repetition.

I'm not interested in replicating 'Hedwig' like a virus.

The Same, the Same: friend and foe are of one stuff; the ploughman, the plough, and the furrow, are of one stuff; and the stuff is such, and so much, that the variations of form are unimportant.

As one gets older, one discovers everything is going to be exactly the same with different hats on.

One is but a shade of the other.

...we can only add to the world, where we believe it ends, more parts similar to those we already know (an expanse made again and always of water and land, stars and skies).

There is repetition everywhere, and nothing is found only once in the world.

Nature may reach the same result in many ways.

It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, wherever and whenever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.

Perfect imitations must share the fate of the originals.

I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection, in order to mark its relation to man's power of selection. But the expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient.

Multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.

The path up and down is one and the same.

I think certain types of processes don’t allow for any variation. If you have to be part of that process, all you can do is transform—or perhaps distort—yourself through that persistent repetition, and make that process a part of your own personality.

The point is, you can't keep doing the same thing and expect it to keep working.

Science is nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in the most remote parts.

Change but the name, and you are the subject of the story.

There is change by necessity or adaptation, and there is contrived change or novelty.

A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die - which variety or species shall increase in number, and which shall decrease, or finally become extinct.