Joseph L. Mankiewicz Quotes

Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn't.

The world does not have tidy endings. The world does not have neat connections. It is not filled with epiphanies that work perfectly at the moment that you need them.

Life is like a box of Hand grenades,You never know what will blow you to kingdom come

Life just doesn't care about our aspirations, or sadness. It's often random, and it's often stupid and it's often completely unexpected, and the closures and the epiphanies and revelations we end up receiving from life, begrudgingly, rarely turn out to be the ones we thought.

History is totally unpredictable.

But such is life, the silliest proverbs prove to be true, and when a man thinks, now it's all right, it's not all right by a longshot. Man proposes, God disposes, and there's always that last straw to break the camel's back.

Most of the time-- 99 percent of the time-- you just don't know how and why the threads are looped together, and that's okay. Do a good thing and something bad happens. Do a bad thing and something good happens. Do nothing and everything explodes.

It was the damnedest thing, life. Once you decide exactly how things are going to go, something or someone comes along and messes it all up.

We're dealing with the chaos of life, and we're rubbing it down. The deeper you rub, the more patterns you can see until you realize that it's really an organized chaos. There isn't really ever any chance to understand it all, but we're here to keep rubbing.

Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move(...)

What interests me is the unforeseeable.

Sometimes I remind myself that I almost skipped the party, that I almost went to a different college, that the whim of a minute could have changed everything and everyone. Our lives, so settled, so specific, are built on happenstance.

Life is a series of dogs.

The future had suddenly become unknowable: anything could happen: the train of my life had jumped the rails and headed off across the fields and coming down the lane with me, then.

Life is like a cucumber. One minute it's in your hand, the next it's up you ass.

Life is not orderly. No matter how we try to make life so, right in the middle of it we die, lose a leg, fall in love, drop a jar of applesauce. In summer, we work hard to make a tidy garden, bordered by pansies with rows or clumps of columbine, petunias, bleeding hearts. Then we find ourselves longing for the forest, where everything has the appearance of disorder; yet we feel peaceful there.

All in all I learned a lesson from it though. You never see it coming you just get to see it go.

It's just a crazy damned life, that's all.

Anything can happen. The great banana peel of existence is always on the floor somewhere.

How plotless real life was!

Nothing will behave in the logical way you have come to expect.

Life cannot be calculated. That's the big mistake our civilization made. We never accepted that randomness is not a mistake in the equation -- it is part of the equation.

Chance is the only source of true novelty.

No matter what I do, no matter how predictable I try to make my life, it will not be any more predictable than the rest of the world. Which is chaotic.

That which hits the fan tends to get flung in all directions.