Karel Reisz Quotes

Headlines are so great in a sense that they can take a little bit from an article completely out of context and blow it into something it's not. Some people really only read headlines.

There are some people in this world who always turn and twist the spoken word out of proportion.

Things definitely got out of perspective.

There's something advantageous about having people underestimate your intellect, insomuch as a lot of things are revealed to you. They assume you don't know what you're talking about, then all of a sudden, you do. And the next thing you know, you have information you wouldn't normally have.

When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.

I think one of the major misconceptions about me is that I live my life the way people think I lead my life, with hot and cold drinks running everywhere and a party all the time. They think of my life in terms of certain excesses that don't really exist. Things are actually fairly simple.

There's a big advantage in people underestimating you.

People will hear one thing and just run with it.

There have been occasions when some people have taken me very seriously.

Not to harp on too much about Ma, but it's a misconception that she is formidable. She calls herself a patsy.

When we met Susan Boyle she was a very unassuming lady. We didn't expect anything and we were probably a little dismissive of her.

No one would talk much in society if they knew how often they misunderstood others.

Most people, it seems, stretch the truth to make themselves seem more impressive. I, it seems, stretch the truth to make myself look worse.

I think for such a long time people had this misconception of who I was and what I was about.

I'm surprised sometimes at how some of my actions are misinterpreted.

Everybody started saying, well, this cat's not as dumb as people think he is.

I'm only 5-foot-6, but people think I'm sort of a great big Viking woman. I'm not - I'm completely normal and average.

When people sometimes misquote me, I don't know if they understand what I'm saying.

If you understand everything, you must be misinformed.

If you hear the question wrong, you will answer wrong.

There is no more dangerous error than that of mistaking the effect for the cause.

Amusingly, Christopher Columbus totally bungled ... by relying on subsequent less-accurate calculations and confusing Arabic miles with Italian miles, concluding that he needed to sail only 3,700 km to reach the Orient when the true value was 19,600 km. He clearly wouldn’t have gotten his trip funded if he’d done his math right, and he clearly wouldn’t have survived if America hadn’t existed, so sometimes being lucky is more important than being right.

A lot of things get misinterpreted with me, I guess.

People misunderstand who I truly am. Truly who I am. If I go somewhere, people just think I'm a party boy 24/7.

It's easy to trick yourself into thinking something's funnier than it is.