David Rabe Quotes

I truly, truly believe that I was going in that direction and all of a sudden fate took me and put me here. It's like something else has other plans for me.

Success sometimes can really bite you in the shorts.

I think it's always interesting to learn what the seemingly spontaneous one-nighter actually reveals about a character.

The law of unintended consequences pushes us ceaselessly through the years, permitting no pause for perspective.

When I was growing up, I always read horror books, while my sister read romance novels. My sister became unmarried and pregnant during high school, and she kept saying, 'This wasn't supposed to happen! Why is this happening to me?' Someone should have given her another book to read.

I think one of the successes of Gladiator is how we manage to turn on a dime the character from one thing to another where you believe he is one thing and he is something very different.

Through shallow intellect, the mind becomes shallow, and one eats the fly, along with the sweets.

I certainly don't think you need to be famous to want to leave a legacy, but when you are famous, it's even more likely that your child will get the wrong perspective on your life if you die prematurely.

Accidents will happen in the best regulated families.

Our life is a book that writes itself and whose principal themes sometimes escape us. We are like characters in a novel who do not always understand what the author wants of them.

Life is full of what-ifs, many of which could easily have been realities, had just a few things been different.

I find that my entire life has come to me, and things happened without me planning them. You know, I never asked to photograph Princess Diana, and that made me more famous than I wanted. I never asked to photograph Madonna, and that pushed me to another level. There are things that just take you into the limelight.

I had arrived years ago in Paris and just wanted to be famous, fast. When you're pretentious like that, and you think you've planned everything perfectly, it's then that everything goes in the opposite way.

On an island, anything can happen. In a crime novel, it usually does.

I usually destroy unreleased material. It has a way of coming back to haunt you.

Ignorance of the facts of life gave me my beloved son, Dickon, but at what cost to both him and me, I cannot hazard a guess.

Man never legislates, but destinies and accidents, happening in all sorts of ways, legislate in all sorts of ways.

The dirty little secret about adventure writing is that something has to go wrong.

What I am against is false optimism: the notion either that things have to go well, or else that they tend to, or else that the default condition of historical trajectories is characteristically beneficial in the long-run.

I think there are narratives going on all the time that we think of as tangential - up until they turn out to be deciding factors in our lives.

The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.

In 'Breaking Bad,' we have a lead character who definitely finds himself in a situation he would never have expected to find himself in normally.

Significant consequences can begin very inconsequentially. That's one thing that fascinates me. The other thing that fascinates me is how accident can undermine something that's unfolding, something that might have played out differently otherwise.

His failures are as valuable as his successes: by misjudging one thing he conforms something else, even if at the time he does not know what that something else is.

The pains of disconcerted or frustrated habits, and the inherent pleasure there is in following them, are motives which nature has put into our wills without generally caring to inform us why; and she sometimes decrees, indeed, that her reasons shall not be ours.