Sarah Dessen Quotes

I am more of a surprise kind of guy. I love to find out as I go.

Producing a series is like being Lewis and Clark: You know where you're going, you just don't know how you're going to get there. When people say, 'You should create a bible for your show,' I say, 'You don't want a bible. It'll prevent you from making discoveries along the way.' And that's what happened on 'The X-Files.'

Liberalism regards life as an adventure in which we must take risks in new situation, in which there is no guarantee that the new will always be the good or the true, in which progress is a precarious achievement rather than inevitability.

I'm not a planner. I like to try something different, to just see what happens.

The important thing is not to know where you are going, to be open to accidents. That's what keeps it fun.

I'll play it first and figure out what it's called later.

There's so much happenstance, so many accidents - stumbling into something and finding it interesting and living with it over time and building on it. It's okay to work from doubt. You need to be willing to not know.

We have the script, we have the actors, and we're trying to figure out what this is, and you don't know what it is. You have to be open to what it's going to become rather than have this thing that you're trying to get to, which is boring.

My methodology is not knowing what I'm doing and making that work for me.

It's important that people are open. Some people say, 'I'm going to be a doctor,' and they're a really good doctor. But for the rest of us, it's a big question mark. Just giving yourself a break, letting yourself try new things, and when something doesn't work out, moving along... it's all we can really do.

So much of making movies is about discovery on the day, what you're figuring out. If you know everything going in, then it's not worth doing - it's already done.

I rarely know too much about anything I'm getting involved in.

I feel very open to trying new things.

I never rule anything out, you never know what's to come.

If we knew what we were doing we wouldn't be entertaining.

I am always living in the now, so I like what fate brings to you. That's always fun for me. To have a process and someone be like, 'How about this?' And you just grab onto that and see where it takes you.

I tend to go with the flow and that flow can end up in great places or not so great places.

For me, I have never walked a path that has been carefully crafted or charted. I have gone into territory unknown on many an occasion.

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

I think the philosophy will continue to be what it always was; which was, let's keep throwing a bunch of things at the wall, and see what sticks.

When you work with an actor and then you discover new things that are better, I think you gotta be free to be able to go with the new things that you're finding. I think that's very important. I have a strong idea when I go to shoot a movie but I also love to discover things when I'm on set as well.

Securities, certitudes and peace do not lead to discoveries.

Take a chance. Don’t be afraid of what you don’t know. And don’t fall in love with Plan A.

The biggest threat to a better life is the desire to keep the future under control - to make the world predictable by reining in creativity and enterprise. Progress as a neat blueprint, with no deviations and no surprise, may work in children's cartoons or utopian novels. But it's just a fantasy.

A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.