Leo Ornstein Quotes

When we read, we are doing more than delectating words on a page stories, characters, images, notions. We are communing with the mind of the author.

Some broad themes brought me where I am today. At a very young age, my hobby became thinking and finding connections.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things.

In Tim's films, more than most, if you miss the tone, you don't get the film.

With great writing, there is great clarity.

Sometimes I think that creativity is a matter of seeing, or stumbling over, unobvious similarities between things - like composing a fresh metaphor, but on a more complex scale.

Literature - novels, plays, and poems - can have an uncanny dual life, where they simultaneously represent something eternal and something historical, and this is often how they are taught in school.

The human brain has evolved the capacity to impose a narrative, complete with chronology and cause-and-effect logic, on whatever it encounters, no matter how apparently random.

If we understand the past, we are more likely to recognise what is happening around us.

As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after.

An apt quotation is like a lamp which flings its light over the whole sentence.

Monologues are self-verifying and self-referencing, a world in their own right, one with its own internal logic that strengthens with reiteration.

I don't have a lot of patience for movies that aren't cleanly told.

Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.

The eye searches for shapes. It searches for a beginning, a middle, and an end.

I'm always trying to find 'connections' between things. That art is the juxtaposition of a lot of things that seem unrelated but add up to something recognizable.

I thought I could never write a proper book; I'd never done it before. But I thought I could write a sequence. Then I had a chapter. The next thing I knew I was turning acting down.

I don't teach literature from my perspective as 'Joyce Carol Oates.' I try to teach fiction from the perspective of each writer. If I'm teaching a story by Hemingway, my endeavor is to present the story that Hemingway wrote in its fullest realization.

The songs sort of come out spontaneously and it'll take me awhile to figure out what exactly is happening lyrically, what kind of story I'm telling. Then I start building little bridges - word bridges - to make everything go from one point to the next point to the next point until it reaches the end.

I would say what Mad Men has taught me has been a super elevated evaluation of text in general, and understanding subtext, and understanding where a character comes from - what he means by this or by that.

One can imagine that the ultimate mathematician is one who can see analogies between analogies.

Asking the author of historical novels to teach you about history is like expecting the composer of a melody to provide answers about radio transmission.

Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setting, a writer creates places where previously invisible truths become visible. Or the storyteller posits a series of dots that the reader can connect.

I think that 'Mary Poppins' needs a subtle reader, in many respects, to grasp all its implications, and I understand that these cannot be translated in terms of the film.

To understand a literary style, consider what it omits.