George Santayana Quotes

The biggest threat to a better life is the desire to keep the future under control - to make the world predictable by reining in creativity and enterprise. Progress as a neat blueprint, with no deviations and no surprise, may work in children's cartoons or utopian novels. But it's just a fantasy.

The problem as you get older... is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There's no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky.

The great fun of doing new plays is that people have no idea what's going to happen next. That goes quite soon, as people start talking about it, and the only way you can keep hold of that is genuinely to keep changing it.

A week is a long time in politics. A month is an eternity.

If innovations were predictable, they wouldn't be discoveries.

A lot could happen in a week. Just look at the last one.

The one fact about the future of which we can be certain is that it will be utterly fantastic.

History shows you don't know what the future brings.

The important thing to remember, if you are trying something that is an innovation, is not to think too much about it. Because if you take too long, by the time you get there, the world will have changed. You take a risk, and if it doesn't work, you make a change. We are not betting our lives on it.

Every once in a while, when the audience is expecting to see one thing, you have to show them something else.

The past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities.

I did not know what my future was going to hold.

I think I've always been slightly addicted to not repeating myself. When you're doing something the first time around, it's often the best time. I think 'Blank Project' is about carrying on. Its that thing where you're making something because you have to, but you don't know how or why.

Tomorrow you might get a phone call about something wonderful and you might get a phone call about something terrible.

The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess.

Who knows what happens tomorrow? We'll find it tomorrow.

People get surprised by my choices. But that comes from me looking for something new.

You can never plan the future by the past.

Yesterday's just a memory, tomorrow is never what it's supposed to be.

The future, like everything else, is not what it used to be.

You never know what could be interesting tomorrow.

It's always better to shock people and change people's expectations than to give them exactly what they think you can do. It's not unexpected for me to be in a comedy film anymore; I'm no longer the underdog in that world. Not that I'm great or good at it or anything, it's just that I've done a bunch of them, so you're not shocked.

You never know how things are going to turn out in a movie. You can imagine a scene one way, and it can turn out to be completely the polar opposite of what you expected. You just have to roll with the punches.

It's been my experience that every time I think I know where it's at, it's usually somewhere else.

I've been around a long time, and life still has a whole lot of surprises for me.