Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes

For me the experience of writing is really an experience of losing control.... I think it's very much like dreaming or like surfing. You go out there and wait for a wave, and when it comes it takes you somewhere and you don't know where it'll go.

Life doesn't often turn out the way we think it will, does it?

There are no absolutes in relationships. You can't take anything for granted. You can count on absolutely nothing but the unexpected. You only get in trouble when you start thinking that you're some kind of exception to the rule.

No act of man can claim to be more than an attempt, not even science.

Science is a match that man has just got alight. He thought he was in a room - in moments of devotion, a temple - and that his light would be reflected from and display walls inscribed with wonderful secrets and pillars carved with philosophical systems wrought into harmony. It is a curious sensation, now that the preliminary splutter is over and the flame burns up clear, to see his hands and just a glimpse of himself and the patch he stands on visible, and around him, in place of all that human comfort and beauty he anticipated - darkness still.

Things never happen exactly how you think they will.

Control was just wishful thinking, and you controlled things to hedge your bets, to be safe, to guard against loss.

I think if your goal is for everything to be okay, that's a mistake. To achieve that goal, the only obstacle you'd have to face tomorrow is to eliminate all risk ... I've made the decision that I'm never trying to make everything okay. I'm trying for there to be more loose ends, not fewer loose ends.

You don't win everything. And you ultimately have to take what you get. I think on the case of [Donald] Trump, there's a much bigger upside than down side.

Once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.

Fate is a shape-shifter. It is the kindest and most generous entity imaginable, laying out more goodness than a person deserves, and then it shrinks and curls and forms into something grotesque. You think something is one thing, but then it´s another.

I never seem to know what's going on... Right from the very start, my life has been strange. I think I know what happened... I must have missed all the rehearsals.

As the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity.

Each of us may think we know exactly what we need to make us happy, what will be good for us, what will ensure we have our happy ending, but life rarely works out in the way we expect, and our happy ending may have all sorts of unexpected twists and turns, be shaped in all sorts of unexpected ways

And don't you let your guard down for a second because you think anything's inevitable.

I mean how do you know what you're going to do till you do it? The answer is, you don't. I think I am, but how do I know? I swear it's a stupid question.

I can't know what I'm going to do before I'm in front of the lens. And I think that sort of makes it exciting.

Nobody knows what Trump is thinking. But they all think they do.

Fear of the unknown is the greatest fear of all.

When we think about the present, we veer wildly between the belief in chance and the evidence in favour of determinism. When we think about the past, however, it seems obvious that everything happened in the way that it was intended.

I think it's fair to say you can't predict a straight line to victory. You know, there'll be good days and bad days along the way.

One wanders through life as if wandering through a field in the dark of night, wearing a blindfold and very heavy shoes, with a poisonous toad waiting patiently beneath a clump of weeds, knowing full well that eventually you will step on him.