Lewis Thomas Quotes

If you create a place where anything can happen, anything will happen.

The nature of improvisation is you don't know what's going to happen.

All great work is preparing yourself for the accident to happen.

When nothing is sure, everything is possible.

Improvisation is terribly haphazard.

There is one word in America that says it all, and that one word is, 'You never know.'

Some people are very lucky, and have the story in their heads. I've never storyboarded anything. I like the idea of chance. What makes God laugh is people who make plans.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it fails, but that's what we face when we're dealing with improvisation.

We have the script, we have the actors, and we're trying to figure out what this is, and you don't know what it is. You have to be open to what it's going to become rather than have this thing that you're trying to get to, which is boring.

Once, the world was full of mysteries, some of them frightening, some of them wonderful, some of them merely fascinating. Now, it can be a banal and predictable place, the tracks of daily life so well-beaten and defined, our culture awash with the imbecile obvious, our existence suffocating in safety. But mysteries remain.

Books are magic: you never know where they're going to end up.

As an actor, you don't know what is going to come next.

I have an abundance of enthusiasm; however, it would be foolish to think I can predict a future that doesn't exist.

I never know what I'm going to write next, and when I think I do I usually turn out to be mistaken.

The whole thing about the way I approach work is to be surprised by an opportunity when it comes up. So I have no idea what I will be doing next, and I kind of like that.

With improvisation, I just do it. It might be a total failure but then you just throw the dice again.

It's difficult because nothing's preordained by plan and you can't control it. That's one of those joys and thrills and nerve-racking realities of being an actor. A lot has to do with luck, no matter what your talent or contribution can be.

The real world has always been far more exciting and funny and dangerous to me than anything somebody could conjure up sitting in front of a computer.

It's thrilling to be onstage and to not know, literally, what the next moment is going to bring. To just submit to the not-knowing-ness of it.

You start with an idea but then so many things can happen.

The challenge of the unknown future is so much more exciting than the stories of the accomplished past.

I don't know - it's a bit of a mystery of how things come about when they do. I don't have a scientific explanation for it. Sometimes when you're writing a song, you don't know where you're going.

Art is lunging forward without certainty about where you are going or how to get there, being open to and dependent on what luck, the paint, the typo, the dissonance, give you. Without art you're stuck with yourself as you are and life as you think life is.

There are no certainties.

In using chance operations, the mind is enriched.