Tracy Pollan Quotes

Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress.

I would say a good leader brings results. A great leader writes a new story, it's different. Obviously a new story has to incorporate a lot of results. But a story is a chapter in the life of a company that people want to write and want to remember.

I'm not good at confrontation. I know my strengths. I like company. And I am not a great arguer... I do find it much easier talking to people I like about things we both like.

I'm a good scholar when it comes to reading but a blotting kind of writer when you give me a pen.

I like it when someone tells me 'I don't agree.' This is a true collaborator. When they say 'Oh, how great, how great, how great,' that's not useful.

So yeah, a good director will be able to listen and hear everything, but have a confident vision of his own that he can say, 'oh yeah - that's a great point.' And you never know; often you can help far more than you think you can, because there's so much more that he's juggling than an actor.

I spent most of high school working on the debate team, probably at some expense to my grades. Being a member of the team was great training in critical analysis, organization, and logic.

I think because I've been working in front of audiences for so many years, I'm able to take in the input, good or bad, and just say, 'This is the part I agree with that you're saying, and these are the parts I don't agree with.'

You need people who have their own views, whose views you respect, whom you can have a productive disagreement with, and work out ideas which you might not have come up with, or who improve on ideas you had.

If you can get really good at destroying your own wrong ideas, that is a great gift.

I attack ideas. I don't attack people. And some very good people have some very bad ideas. And if you can't separate the two, you gotta get another day job. You don't want to be a judge. At least not a judge on a multi-member panel.

You have to be critical of what you do every day, to analyze it and be willing to push it further.

Not all negativity is bad. In politics, it's a necessary clarifying tool.

Even the finest workman needs to inspect his work critically.

I think it's a good idea to be - to fairly identify where things could have gone better once you get the facts, once you get the data and once you're able to review.

It is the metaphysically given that must be accepted: it cannot be changed. It is the man-made that must never be accepted uncritically: it must be judged, then accepted or rejected and changed when necessary.

If we make mistakes in our first compositions and do not know them, we may not amend them.

Improvements are invented only by those who can feel that something is not good.

Criticism exists only to recognize the truth, not to act as judge.

If you want to "get in touch with your feelings," fine, talk to yourself. We all do. But if you want to communicate with another thinking human being, get in touch with your thoughts. Put them in order, give them a purpose, use them to persuade, to instruct, to discover, to seduce. The secret way to do this is to write it down, and then cut out the confusing parts.

And your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perhaps bewildered and embarrassed, perhaps also protesting. But don't give in, insist on arguments, and act in this way, attentive and persistent, every single time, and the day will come when, instead of being a destroyer, it will become one of your best workers-perhaps the most intelligent of all the ones that are building your life.

If you are going to try and change things, you had better have your wits about you.

Never attack a problem without also presenting a solution.

Criticism per se does not worry me. I've always solicited it as part of the design process.