Ornette Coleman Quotes

I think the British viewing and listening public are very fickle. If they like you they will listen to you, they will watch you. If they change their mind then it's all over.

You never know what’s going to happen at a confirmation hearing.

… experience should teach us that it is always the unexpected that does occur!

History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It's been around a long time.

You never know when what you do in the arts means something to people, and you never really know if you've been received well.

Just because you make a good plan, doesn't mean that's what's gonna happen.

Every lap is different.

Time is very weird.

Just because something is not happening to you doesn't mean that it never will.

In my career, I've found that anything can happen.

Fans don't even know what they want at times.

My experience would say to me, never presume to have an answer to what the people are actually going to do.

Just because I have two world records, everyone assumes that means automatically it is two guaranteed gold medals, but it isn't like that, and anything can happen in a race.

A life of anybody is not perfect; there is always things that happen, and that is what makes it interesting.

An habitation giddy and unsure Hath he that buildeth on the vulgar heart.

I have come to the conclusion, after many years of sometimes sad experience, that you cannot come to any conclusion at all.

Increasingly as I've gotten older, I'm much more interested in what the reality of the shoot is going to be versus what the result of the shoot might be. I'm so bad at guessing what's going to be good and what's going to be bad - there doesn't seem to be any correlation between things that are within your control.

Hollywood is like a stock market - you're always up and down and all around. With age, you start to invest less in the outcome of that.

I've been in politics long enough to know that polls just go poof at times.

Of course one never knows in draft if it's going to turn out, even with my age and experience.

All calculations based on experience elsewhere, fail in New Mexico.

Nothing is so uncertain or unpredictable as the feelings of a crowd.

There are those who imagine that the unlucky accidents of life—life's "experiences"—are in some way useful to us. I wish I could find out how. I never know one of them to happen twice. They always change off and swap around and catch you on your inexperienced side.

Quoting her mother: The trouble with a book is you never know what's in it until it's too late!

Maxims in times of danger are useless, experience is incommunicable. The knotted strands of life, desire, assumptions, and moral codes cannot be unsnarled; they can only be cut, which is what happens when an air raid occurs, with a silencing fortissimo like the finale of a Beethoven symphony.