Philip Rosenthal Quotes

You need to make mistakes in rehearsal because that's how you find out what works and what doesn't.

Oftentimes the shows that don't work help you get it right.

Almost nothing works the first time it's attempted. Just because what you're doing does not seem to be working, doesn't mean it won't work. It just means that it might not work the way you're doing it.

Progress through trial and error depends not only on making trials, but on recognizing errors.

When you make content, you try things, and they don't always work. You learn from it and figure out what's next.

More can be learned from what works than from what fails.

As you get out and try to do things, you always find that in order to make an idea a reality, it goes through some changes. It doesn't always come out exactly like you envisioned it.

Much can often be learned by the repetition under different conditions, even if the desired result is not obtained.

For me, I'd rather be the inventive one, and if something doesn't work, I'll go back to the workshop, put it on the bench, and pound on it for awhile.

Sometimes the best way to learn something is by doing it wrong and looking at what you did.

I think mistakes are the essence of science and law. It's impossible to conceive of either scientific progress or legal progress without understanding the important role of being wrong and of mistakes.

But that's one of the nice things about doing a stage show, if something doesn't work out, you have the luxury of working on it over time.

Most intuitive ideas have to be clarified, so there is a trial and error process.

Think small. Don't pretend you know the answers. Experiment; get feedback. These are all the premises of 'Think Like a Freak,' really.

A lot of what we do in the studio on a day-to-day basis is you try to cast a line as far out as you can out into unknown waters and reel it back in, cut out stuff that isn't working, cut out stuff that isn't connecting to people.

Essentially, 'Z2' ended up feeling the way that it should, but it was through a considerable amount of trial and error that it took to get there.

So, it's a continual process of trial and error and then I find things and I throw it out and start again, but I keep writing it over again.

I like to really spend the time and figure it out and rehearsal is to try something that doesn't work. It's hard to do that, because you always want to go with your impulse thought and you wonder if that's the one, did that work, you know?

40% of what I've done was a mistake. I now call it R&D.

Failure's inevitable. It happens all the time in a complex economy. And how did the economy produce all these amazing things that we have around us, computers and cell phones and so on? Well, the process was trial and error. There were a bunch of ideas, and the good ones grew and prospered, and the bad ones were pretty ruthlessly weeded out.

In all science, error precedes the truth, and it is better it should go first than last.

I think a lot of what you do in acting, and for the most part singing and dancing and everything, is trial and error. It's all about just seeing what works, and if it does, to use it, and if not, to throw it away.

I'm one of those actors who likes to do it wrong nine ways before I come to the tenth way, which is the way I think it should be.

We often say that the biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee to fail intelligently... to experiment over and over again and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work.

I think if I try to develop a formula, it ends up not working.