Quotes About Meaning

I'm struggling with what is epic. People decided I was epic - if by epic, do you mean a big, heavy book? 'David Copperfield' is a big book - is it epic? Amount of time covered, length, drama, or story - that's the real appeal - if the story is long you have a better chance of becoming more connected.

The average person can look at someone in public life and say they have it all, but they might be struggling. Or you may think another person has more apparent challenges, but she's deeply grateful for her life. I don't think anyone can judge what having it all means for someone else.

It would take some encouragement for me to accept other people's opinions on how I should present my work because my work means a lot to me.

There will be opportunities for hope and happiness, and happiness will return to your life, but you will always feel that loss if that person really meant that great a deal to you.

That was something. As opposed to nothing.

'Pleasure' is a word I think about a lot, as opposed to 'entertainment.' They are very, very different.

I try not to interpret things of the world into a single meaning. Rather, I try the opposite.

Art removes boundaries and makes the world brighter. It is the common language for people all over the world. But politics are the opposite completely. Politicians, their very meaning is based on the lines they draw.

It is all nonsense, to be sure; and so much the greater nonsense inasmuch as the true interpretation of many dreams - not by any means of all dreams - moves, it may be said, in the opposite direction to the method of psycho-analysis.

To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist.

I think you would have to be a nihilist to say that we are not making progress on cancer, just like you'd have to be hubristically optimistic to say that we have conquered cancer.

In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.

That's important to me, to find the extraordinary inside the ordinary.

I like to think that the best poetry is or involves a contest between ordinary conversation and ritual.

Quentin is very organic; there was no way that he was going to put someone else's hand in there and anyway, my hands are kind of famous. It seemed right.

I don't know what organically grown chickens are; I've never seen one.

All the great organizations in the world, all have a sense of why that organization does what it does.

I do have that compulsion to organize moments into a larger thing.

There's the part of me that's the organizer, part of me that's the artist, part of me that's the person who, even with those two things, wants to figure out what my place in the world is. How to engage with it and whether my life has any meaning.

Most of the names in my books have secondary meaning. Sometimes they foreshadow; sometimes they tell you about the character's origin or back story.

Imagine a world without art: it's George Orwell's nightmare!

I was on the set of 'Braveheart' and my mate says to me, 'Do you think this film will be any good?' And I really meant this, too, I told him 'Let me put it this way - It won't win any awards.' Cut to: five Oscars.

The fire in the belly is essential, otherwise you become Michael Buble - famous and meaningless.

When we can't determine what is art - when you get to that point where we're not sure, that's the greatest likelihood that we're actually experiencing something great. But I think that's what the art world is most afraid of, because you lose that security. Then we don't know how to assign evaluation, whether it's cultural or otherwise.