Sam Altman Quotes

You must remember, my dear lady, the most important rule of any successful illusion: First, the people must want to believe in it.

People who have a reputation for being evil are usually good.

One of my earliest memories is my father telling me to behave because I'm about to meet and work with the greatest actor of all time. Then this old guy comes out and I was like, 'Pfff, he doesn't look anything like Luke Skywalker, I don't know what my dad is trying to tell me here.'

And I love the twist. I love to fool you once, I love to fool you twice, and on the very last page, quite often - very last paragraph sometimes - I like to just play with your perception one more time in a way that makes everything that came before just a little bit different.

Beware, as long as you live, of judging people by appearances.

You meet lots of people in your life, and sometimes you think that people are a certain way, and then they reveal themselves to be a different way.

Things are not always as they seem.

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

The whole thing's illusion, [Jacob], and there's nothing wrong with that. It's what people want from us. It's what they expect.

It would be a terrible mistake to go through life thinking that people are the sum total of what you see.

People, unless they're paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority.

I was looking at these actresses sort of sitting around under umbrellas, people bringing them cold drinks and I was like, 'That looks so much easier than what I'm doing' and I was so wrong.

I saw a door that said exit only. So I entered through it and went up to the guy working there and said "I have good news. You have severely underestimated that door over there. By like a hundred percent."

Am I Machiavellian? I don't think I'm quite the mastermind people would have me be. Everything I do tends to be very successful and it may have something to do with the fact that I'm very good, not necessarily that I manipulate. But that doesn't often occur to people.

There's a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork. And it's wrong. All roads lead away from Ankh-Morpork, but sometimes people just walk along them the wrong way.

You know how it is when you’re walking up the stairs, and you get to the top, and you think there’s one more step? I’m like that all the time.

Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that's what people observe.

People Expect Something New From Me All The Time.And That's Good It Keeps Me On The Edge

Kittredge had obviously misjudged her, but he had learned that was the way with most people. The story was never the story, and it surprised you, how much another person could carry.

Truth is more deceptive than falsehood, for it is more frequently presented by those from whom we do not expect it, and so has against it a numerical presumption.

All publishers are Columbuses. The successful author is their America. The reflection that they-like Columbus-didn't discover what they expected to discover, and didn't discover what they started out to discover, doesn't trouble them. All they remember is that they discovered America; they forget that they started out to discover some patch or corner of India.

My friend, the truth is always implausible, did you know that? To make the truth more plausible, it's absolutely necessary to mix a bit of falsehood with it. People have always done so.

On one hand it's very flattering to be compared to a big success, and then sometimes it's very frustrating because you want people to see the movie that you're making and not be continually comparing it to something that it's not. So it goes both ways.

I think that, like anything, people take their image and what they want somebody else to be and then people just run with it. And when you really know the person and really love the person, you recognize that that person is nothing like that.

When people make the mistake of underestimating me, that's when they are really in for their biggest surprise.