Michael Otto Quotes

I wish to be clear: all foreign investments will be safe in Zimbabwe.

You're never too worried as a captain, when you know Rahul Dravid's still out there.

And we can't avoid an inch of our own experience; if we do it causes a blur, a bleep, a puffy unreality. Our job is to wake up to everything, because if we slow down enough, we see that we are everything.

The joy of life is born of concentration. When you are having a cup of tea, the value of that experience depends on your concentration. You have to drink the tea with 100 percent of your concentration.

Let experience, the least fallible guide of human opinion, be appealed to for an answer to these inquiries.

Some smack of age in you, some relish of the saltness of time.

Let your memory be your travel bag.

It's harder to work with people who are not as dedicated to their craft. It also leaves you a better actor when you finish the project, since you always feel like you've learned something.

If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new. We are told that the oldest inhabitants in Peru do not cease to be agitated by the earthquakes, but they probably see beyond each shock, and reflect that there are plenty more to come.

In life, the classroom is everywhere. The exam comes at the very end.

The great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there.

Like most-maybe all- writers, I learned to write by writing and, by example, by reading books.

Ah, the outdoors,' Shallan said. 'I visited that mythical place once.

Casting is really a black art. It's a huge part of directing and it's the most invisible. It's one that people don't really think about or talk about. But you can really destroy your movie by casting it badly before you've shot a foot of film. And yet there are no guidebooks for it, there's no rule book to tell you how to do it. It's all your own experience and your own sensibility and your own intuition.

Memory was a curse, yes, he thought, but it was also the greatest gift. Because if you lost memory you lost everything.

As in the game of billiards, the balls are constantly producing effects from mere chance, which the most skillful player could neither execute nor foresee, but which, when they do happen, serve mainly to teach him how much he has still to learn; so it is in the most profound and complicated game of politics and diplomacy. In both cases, we can only regulate our play by what we have seen, rather than by what we have hoped; and by what we have experienced, rather than by what we have expected.

When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it, what will it be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then - that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it. You say you have poets in your world. Do they not teach you this?

He who tastes not, knows not.

The very idea that there is some kind of conflict between science and religion is completely mistaken. Science is a method for investigating experience... Religion is the fundamental, necessary internalization of our system of more permanent values.

Food for thought is no substitute for the real thing.

I'm still learning. It's all a learning curve. Every time you sit down, with any given episode of any given show, it is a learning curve. You're learning something new about how to tell a story. But then, I've felt that way about everything I've ever done - television, features or whatever. Directing or writing, it always feels like the first day of school to me.

There's always something every night that I learn from reacting to what the audience is reacting to. You learn what to leave out, what to put in, if you need a little more comedy or more drama.

You're not going to see a new Bernard Hopkins. I'm too old for that crap. I think what you will see is something different that I know I am capable of doing.

Write from what you know into what you don't know.

Young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.