Quotes About Learning

Usually, you can figure out where a person's mistakes came from if you ask them the genesis of their thought process: 'Why did you do it this way?' As opposed to telling them they did it the wrong way. Understanding their thought process will ultimately help you be able to communicate with them and navigate around them.

There have been times when I have goofed up, and like every adolescent, I sometimes did get led the wrong way. I would come back home really scared to face my mom's wrath and anger, but surprisingly, I never got to face one. She would always tell me in a very nice manner that what I did was wrong and that I should correct myself.

In Cleveland, I was a young rookie. I was trying to be like the veterans when I wasn't a veteran. That was definitely the wrong way to go about things.

In Orlando, I handled a lot of stuff the wrong way.

There have been scenes and sequences I've done that I watch back now and cringe and think I dealt with that in completely the wrong way. Sometimes I'm too emotional - too invested, in that sense - but you learn, and then you don't do it again.

I tried changing my swing because I thought it would make me better. I thought it would make me a world-class golfer. I was a bit naive and I was a bit silly and just got going the wrong way.

Perfectionist is sometimes the wrong word... It means like you're never satisfied, or you're upset by every single failure - any type of failure. And so for me, I don't look at failure as necessarily a bad thing as long as I'm able to learn from it and take something from it, so that next time I'm in that situation I know how to succeed.

With trials, you become wiser. You learn more about yourself and the people surrounding you. Me personally, I've never been the type of person to judge anyone over wrongdoing, no matter what it is. I'm just not a judgmental person.

Two wrongs may not make a right, but a thousand wrongs make a writer.

I always like to remind myself that the most honorable people of all are not those who never make mistakes, but those who admit to them when they do and then move on and do their best to right the wrongs they have made.

Our films have to entertain without the viewer being guided to a humdrum set of do's and don't's. At the same time, as a filmmaker, my films should evoke some feelings, some thoughts in their minds. That's the purpose of cinema. It has to be a learning experience without advocating rights or wrongs in a subtle manner.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

For years, I wrote songs to try to get cuts or try to have hits or try to appease a label or to be famous. I was learning a lot of valuable tools about structure and how to articulate. I was getting really good at that.

I had amazing intellectual privilege as a kid. My mom taught me to read when I was two or three. When I was five, I read and wrote well enough to do my nine-year older brother's homework in exchange for chocolate or cigarettes. By the time I was 10, I was reading Orwell, Tolstoy's 'War and Peace,' and the Koran. I was reading comic books, too.

The first novel I wrote was a monster - clocking in at 180,000 words - but it died a death, a death it deserved. It was called 'The Gods First Make Mad.' It was a good title, but it was the only good thing about the book. I didn't let that put me off.

Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.

I didn't pretend that I was good at writing music, so I wrote terrible music, intentionally. As time went on, the terrible subsided, and I started getting good.

For my first show at 'SNL', I wrote a Bill Clinton sketch, and during our read-through, it wasn't getting any laughs. This weight of embarrassment came over me, and I felt like I was sweating from my spine out. But I realized, 'Okay, that happened, and I did not die.' You've got to experience failure to understand that you can survive it.

Gunna ain't never wrote no song for me. He just showed me how to rap.

When I wrote The Onion Field, I realized that my first two novels were just practice.

I'd like to be a student in Rabindranath Tagore's school in Santiniketan in around 1915, dancing in the dance-dramas he wrote.

It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.

I wrote my first song at 12 and remember someone asking, 'What were you going through at 12 that you could write about?' I get what you're saying, but 11, 12, 13 were the hardest years of my life. You learn everything. You learn how horrible things feel.

I wrote a few unsuccessful screenplays before I wrote 'Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.' I wrote them as television plays that never got made. I'm glad I wrote them - I think it was a good experience.