Jarvis Cocker Quotes

I love to see lack of clarity in a performance as well as clarity, as well as trust, as well as the kinds of things that human beings go through. I love to see spontaneity and 'inevitability.' How it gets there is going to shock the hell out of me, but it will get there somehow.

I prefer my hesitations, my false paths, my stammering, to a preconceived idea.

You might be an interested guy, an interested reported then I get to know you and then I know you're this also and you're this also and you may hide it in a certain way. That's what I love.

Securities, certitudes and peace do not lead to discoveries.

Men are rather beholden ... generally to chance or anything else, than to logic, for the invention of arts and sciences.

I could feel my body temperature - I knew I was bright red. It was so humiliating, I was so upset, and it was nothing I had planned to do. It was just one of those beautiful moments, the alchemy of acting that is so mysterious, where you sort of go, "How did that come out of me?"

Think you've seen it all? Think again. Outside those doors, we might see anything. We could find new worlds, terrifying monsters, impossible things. And if you come with me... nothing will ever be the same again!

There's not swelling music and emotional scenes in life, and there's not long pauses when you tell a joke for everybody to laugh. That's not how it goes. Life just sort of happens to you.

We are in a position similar to that of a mountaineer who is wandering over uncharted spaces, and never knows whether behind the peak which he sees in front of him and which he tries to scale there may not be another peak still beyond and higher up.

Life-actors never rehearse and need no script. A life-actor uses whatever he has available, nothing more, nothing less.

When I go onstage, I don't know what I'm going to say. I don't know what's going to come out of my mouth. It's one of those questions where any and everything is possible. I literally could be talking about somebody I was hanging out with two seconds ago or something from the news. Literally, there's really no rhyme or reason for it. I want to be free flowing like that.

We travel because we do not know. We know that we do not know the best before we start. That is why we start. But we forget that we do not know the worst either. That is why we come back.

In my limited experience, shows are like children. You can teach them manners and dress them in little sailor suits, but in the end, they're going to be who they're going to be.

Research is a way of taking calculated risks to bring about incalculable consequences.

Discovery requires courage and acceptance that we are not in control, and that the future is uncertain.

Although the way ahead [for immunology] is full of pitfalls and difficulties, this is indeed an exhilarating prospect. There is no danger of a shortage of forthcoming excitement in the subject. Yet, as always, the highlights of tomorrow are the unpredictabilities of today.

My life is not possible to tell. I change every day, change my patterns, my concepts, my interpretations. I am a series of moods and sensations. I play a thousand roles. I weep when I find others play them for me. My real self is unknown. My work is merely an essence of this vast and deep adventure.

Truth is more of a stranger than fiction.

Among its many other obligations, fiction always has to be believable. Life does not have to suffer such constraint, and much of what takes place is believable only because it happens.

With that explosion of dance music thing, there have been some downsides. We're lacking a little bit of connection right now. Pop music is so massive. It's everywhere. Today, there's less of discovery. There's less "I'm going to drive two hours and go see him at this dirty night club." We're missing a little bit of that. It's still there, and I feel like those connections are still made.

We didn't discover our values in a poll taken a week before the convention.

The truth is funny. Honest discovery, observation, and reaction is better than contrived invention.

When I'm making a movie, I don't like to know what's going to happen next. I like to watch something and be surprised all the time, and just not know, and let it take me wherever.

America was discovered accidentally by a great seaman who was looking for something else; when discovered it was not wanted; and most of the exploration for the next fifty years was done in the hope of getting through or around it. America was named after a man who discovered no part of the New World. History is like that, very chancy.

Mathematical discoveries, like springtime violets in the woods, have their season which no human can hasten or retard.