David Carson Quotes

I do not want to be a robot, a cog in society who answers 'yes' because 'yes' is considered the appropriate answer. Neither do I want to be a protestor. I just want to seek out what lies underneath the veils of politeness and programming that I've been given as a person in this society.

I believe there's one rule in Hollywood, and that's that there are no rules.

I was very aware of office politics because I was so baffled by them. So much so goes unsaid. No one says 'you're a cheeky so-and-so,' no one says 'you're so moody,' nobody ever confronts anyone else about anything. But I'm very crass, and I'm very confrontational, and I have a temper. I had to be hyper-vigilant in every office I worked in.

On the surface we all act like we all love each other and we're free and easy, and actually we're far more moralistic than any other society I've ever lived in.

Conventions are unstated agreements within a community to abide by a single way of doing things - not because there is any inherent advantage to the choice, but because there is an advantage to everyone making the same choice.

I avoid talking about the way I work. But in avoiding it I seem only to have encouraged people to focus their fantasies about me in an ever more fantastical way.

Women have a way of contorting things sometimes. We all have our moods, ups and downs. Or if the guy doesn't say anything when you walk out with a new top and the guy has no idea why you're mad at him. So of course, women are complicated.

Often my characters don't know what the issues of the play are. They think they're doing one thing, but something else is actually orchestrating their lives.

I like design, I like details, to me it is just another form of self-expression.

In terms of design, it's true the world has an influence. But, as a designer, you have to protect yourself. You have to look at the world and then forget it.

There's a particularly British wariness of appearing to try too hard. It's somehow distasteful. Everything should come to us seamlessly and, if you have to work at it, you're somehow a loser.

Just as the common law derives from ancient precedents - judges' decisions - rather than statutes, baseball's codes are the game's distilled mores. Their unchanged purpose is to show respect for opponents and the game. In baseball, as in the remainder of life, the most important rules are unwritten. But not unenforced.

Why can't somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks.

I, for one, always expect my husband to read my mind.

Is there anything in the world more annoyingly creepy than an unspoken dress code?

Gotta know the rules to break the rules.

There's some people who violate that man-code of the gym.

The routines of social intercourse in established settings allow us to deal with anticipated others without special attention or thought.

I broke pretty much every rule of classic game design and tried to invent new ones.

Once, I was up north with friends and, after dinner, one lady who was at the table said, 'Would you sing for me?' and I went 'Well, sure.' And the other women are looking and going, 'You never sing for us.' Well, you never ask me.

Me and my dad never talked racing. We just didn't. I wouldn't go up and ask him about that unless I wanted to upset him.

As long as you don't fly openly in the face of society, society doesn't ask any inconvenient questions; and it makes precious short work of the cads who do. There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.

She was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don't apply to you.

It's very difficult to know when you're crossing the boundary. I hate the word boundary because I never think about it when taking a picture. Very often it doesn't mean anything because it depends on who's looking at the picture more than the content of the picture itself.

I stayed true to what I thought was good design no matter who it was for.