Quotes About Discovery

For me, there's something very romantic about going and looking at the stars and trying to photograph spy satellites.

I think I'm alright as a lyricist, you know? But then what will happen every couple of months or so is that I'll hear a song I've never heard before and feel I've gone right back to square one.

My listening changed when I heard music from Stax, Atlantic, Motown because by that age I thought anything that my parents listened to must be square. So I had to find my own rock n' roll, as it were, and I found it in black soul music.

Specifically choose not to take a GPS. Just create a challenge. You can climb Everest or walk across Antarctica with minimal gear and still have that sense of adventure. But in terms of exploration, Google Earth has this world mapped down to the square foot.

I lived within walking distance of Harvard Square, and that's where I discovered my love of cinema. I saw a lot of foreign and independent films there.

I love knowing that if I was dropped off in Trafalgar Square, I could walk in any direction and see something amazing or eat something delicious.

I have discovered France's best-kept secret. Reunion is an island of some 970 square miles situated in the Indian Ocean south-west of Mauritius and east of Madagascar.

Before I discovered CrossFit, I was really just doing regular bodybuilding, didn't understand athletic training and movements. I didn't even know how to squat, necessarily.

This led to the discovery that long chain fatty acids would remarkably stabilize serum albumin to heat denaturation, and would even reverse the denaturation by heat or concentrated urea solutions.

I am very lucky that I came from a stable home, but I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life until acting sorted of landed in my lap when I was in my 20s. Acting, to me, was a bit like the ladder I used to climb out of feeling lost.

The first time I ever heard the blues, my parents had a stack of records that they weren't using anymore. I found them when I was ten; I didn't know what it was. But I found Lightnin' Hopkins.

I was a bit of a backstage baby, but I wasn't at all precocious, and there was never a light bulb moment when I decided to go on the stage.

I wrote about 22 plays before 'When You Cure Me,' which was staged in 2005. I occasionally get them out and have a read, thinking maybe there's a thought or an idea or even a turn of phrase that I could use for something new. There's not. They're dire.

You can't tell what's going to fulfill you in different stages in your life.

No matter how many times you've done it, the early stages of getting a show up on its feet is very hit and miss. There seem to be thousands of options on every page to discover.

The first book I ever bought for myself was 'One Fish Two Fish' by Dr. Seuss. My favourite page shows two children carrying an enormous glass jar up some stairs in the dark. In the jar is a tusked beflippered creature floating in brine.

The Internet is a good way to try some stuff with no big crew and no money being spent. Since there are no stakes to it, you can try to be a little experimental.

Working with the children on 'Matilda' has been a joy. They don't do this professionally - their sense of discovery is instinctive, and the challenge for us adults is to keep that going in ourselves when we're doing it for the fiftieth or the hundredth time. To my delight and amazement, it hasn't gone stale - we discover it freshly every time.

I enjoyed singing and playing guitar but didn't have the stamina to make music-making a career. In reality, writing was my real gift, and as soon as I figured that out I never looked back.

My dad was a keen philatelist and, when he died, he left me an album he'd curated over some 40 years. He'd handpicked every item, saying each one reminded him of me. I opened it to discover the pages were full of beige stamps bearing the image of George V. Take from that what you will.

My first starring role was in 'Rumpelstiltskin' and the lightbulb moment for me came when I had to stamp my foot at the end and walk off the stage. Everyone laughed and I thought, 'this is great.'

Some people collect stamps; I like fashion, discovering nice new things. I feel good about doing that.

Stan and I funded the first phase of the work ourselves. It was secret.

I didn't want to perform comedy. I always loved humor. Loved making people laugh. I was a big stand up fan, but it wasn't until I was managing a restaurant that had a comedy night and one of the producers asked me to go on stage that I wanted to do it.