Steven Moffat Quotes

[Sherlock Holmes] has moved from being someone who was sociopathic, work-obsessed and slightly amoral, into being someone who has a certain degree of a private life, which is very, very private, with The Woman, or Irene Adler.

We all know people for that length of time and people change. They mature. There is a certain expectation that a fictional character does not change. But you can't go back and play him the same way.

Nobody likes to see a stupid guy wise up.

People say that crisis changes people and turns ordinary people into wiser or more responsible ones.

People can start out one way, and by the time life gets through with them they end up completely different.

By associating with wise people you will become wise yourself.

In growing old, we become more foolish - and more wise.

Changers are characters who alter in significant ways as a result of the events of your story. They learn something or grow into better or worse people, but by the end of the story they are not the same personalities they were in the beginning. Their change, in its various stages, is called the story's emotional arc.

The disadvantage of becoming wise is that you realize how foolish you've been.

The mental flexibility of the wise man permits him to keep an open mind and enables him to readjust himself whenever it becomes necessary for a change.

We are all wise for other people, none for himself.

It was wise enough to know itself, and brave enough to be itself, and wild enough to change itself while somehow staying altogether true.

To me good storytelling is about journeys. It's about people's journeys, people's discoveries and how they deal with those discoveries; circumstances that put people in different situations.

A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change.

Though we may be learned by another's knowledge, we can never be wise but by our own experience.

You just learn one thing for the day, that can change a fight.

There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters. Even trashy bestsellers show people changing. When a fictional work fails to show change, when it merely indicates that human character is set, stony, unregenerable, then you are out of field of the novel and into that of the fable or the allegory. - from the introduction of the 1986 Norton edition

I never did a single wise thing in the whole course of my existence, although I have written many which have been thought so.

There is no man ... however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man -- so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise -- unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded.

Of course you want to drive that out of yourself because you want to be wise, not foolish. You also have to allow for the self-serving bias of everybody else because most people are not going to remove it all that successfully, the human condition being what it is. If you don't allow for self-serving bias in your conduct, again you're a fool.

I was born wise. Street-wise, people-wise, self-wise. This wisdom was my birthright.

A man cannot learn to be wise any more than he can learn to be handsome.

CONTEMPLATE THE workings of this world, listen to the words of the wise, and take all that is good as your own. With this as your base, open your own door to truth. Do not overlook the truth that is right before you.

They say that there are three kinds of people in the world. There are people who never learn one way or another anything; there are people who learn from their own mistakes, eventually and with great pain; and then there are the really wise people who learn from other people's mistakes and spare themselves the suffering.