Barbara Kopple Quotes

I guess, what I'm saying is that when I've been this surprised by my own characters and world, all bets are off.

The thing about the future is that it never feels the way we thought it would.

History does not repeat itself. Nor does it unfold in cycles. The real future is contingent, rich beyond imagining, a perennial gobsmack, tragic and glorious in equal measure; the pundits' future, spun of 'conventional wisdom,' is only a sucker punch to that common-sense fact.

I'm always surprised by things that happen to my work.

The future? Like unwritten books and unborn children, you don't talk about it.

Life doesn't always give us what we are expecting.

I don't want to set the world up for surprises.

It's so funny when you're actually directing because things start popping that you don't expect to pop, and something that you think is going to pop, maybe doesn't quite have the impetus that you thought it might.

Life is always surprising to me. When you think it's going to get dull, it never really does.

You never know what events are going to transpire to get you home.

Some things are so unexpected that no one is prepared for them.

While most of the things you've worried about have never happened, it's a different story with the things you haven't worried about. They are the ones that happen.

It is an endless procession of surprises. The expected rarely occurs and never in the expected manner.

I start with a character and a situation, but I don't know what's going to happen until I write it. Sometimes things happen that surprise me.

The future has a way of arriving unannounced.

Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens.

It is always the unreadable that occurs.

Who likes surprises? Nobody I know likes surprises. But facts change on the ground.

No man can tell what the future may bring forth

… experience should teach us that it is always the unexpected that does occur!

I don't like to make predictions, because my life's been pretty unpredictable so far.

The older I get, the more I'm surprised with life. Things don't end up the way you think they will.

Life is crazy. It goes in directions that you could never guess.

We expect surprises. There has to be surprises.

It's weird writing for a documentary because I have all these ideas for what I want to happen, but what actually happens is obviously completely different.