Quotes from Jonathan Miller

Being a doctor has taught me a lot about directing. You're doing the same thing: You're reconstructing the manifold of behavior to the point where an audience says, yes, that's exactly like people I know.

In North America there is the general belief that everything can be fixed, that life can be fixed up. In Europe, the view is that a lot can't be fixed up and that living properly is not necessarily a question of mastering the technology so much as learning to live gracefully within the constraints that the species invents.

What I should have been, you see, is a neurologist.

A lot of high-level scientists are in fact people of almost universal interest.

Argumentative exhibitions bring issues to life in a way that very much irritates traditional curators who want to see their pictures valued for themselves.

The burden of the past is only, I think, oppressive when you've got to go on the experience of the avant garde.

People can't draw now and don't feel it's necessary. Art students don't seem to want to draw.

I spend a lot of my time trying to draw the attention of actors to the minute and subtle details of human behavior, which was the sort of thing I was looking at when I was a neurologist.

Someone like Einstein was quite clearly a moralist, and he had a very highly developed political vision and was very spiritual in his way, and there are many biologists and physicists of the first order who are like that.