Quotes About Analysis

We didn't even think about it, you know? I used to collect laser discs, and you'd have some college professor analyzing It's a Wonderful Life or Citizen Kane, and now it is pretty funny - the idea of commentary for a silly kid's movie, you know?

I certainly learned how to break down a text at Princeton, which helps me break down a script - or at least that's the line I feed my parents when they start wondering where all that good money went.

Look at 'Marienbad' honestly. What is it? It is just another talking radio show with pictures. Nobody acts. People stand around while the author talks about the woodwork.

My analysis was directed toward purely physical conditions, such as defective wiring, presence of lack of air spaces between metal flues and woodwork, etc., and the results were presented in these terms.

Woody says I can make jokes, but I don't get them - I'm always looking deeper for the meanings.

Very few people have actually read Freud, but everyone seems prepared to talk about him in that Woody Allen way. To read Freud is not as much fun.

What I think of as 'freakonomics' is mostly storytelling around an idea - not a theme but an idea. I like ideas much more than themes. Themes are boring. Themes are, 'Wool is back,' but ideas are, 'Why is wool back?'

Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and justification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical.

Words are the children of reason and, therefore, can't explain it. They really can't translate feeling because they're not part of it. That's why it bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It's not. It's feeling.

I do my own analysis on the teams I am refereeing. I will know some of the personalities, the players who could be difficult customers in a scrum situation, the ones I am going to have to really work hard on early in the game to get what I want.

I don't have any magical ability. I look at a problem, play with it, work out a strategy.

In Italy, the coaches are very attentive to the details. They really study things, and that is a big difference here. They look at your movement, your positioning. They study you and work out how to stop you.

Anti-submarine warfare is the military version of chess. You must work out what the enemy is going to do before they even think of it.

People often talk about parachute journalism, but one of the skills that you get when you are a correspondent is the ability to look at facts fast and work out what the story is.

I don't analyze what I'm doing. I've read convincing interpretations of my work, and sometimes I've noticed something that I wasn't aware of, but I think, at this point, people read into my work out of habit. Or I'm just very, very smart.

For 'Power of 10,' you can look at the methodology at CBS.com, it's a company called Rasmussen Reports. We poll thousands and thousands of people for each question, a real cross section of the United States.

Magicians have done controlled testing in human perception for thousands of years.

Every movie that I do, if you analyze the stories, you can notice that in each story, that within the movie after the first 15 minutes, it could fall apart. Or every 10 minutes it has the chance that you lose the thread. On the other hand, if you succeed in putting them together, then the movie looks spontaneous and more like cinema.

My approach has never been to start from theories to arrive at facts, but on the contrary, to try to bring out from the facts the explanatory thread without which they appear incomprehensible and elude effective action.

Part of my responsibility as an officer was to oversee a team of analysts charged with synthesizing all of the data points on the map to see how one related to another. By bringing those data points together, a broader picture could be drawn and a strategy developed to counter the existing threat.

If you misdiagnose, if you misdiagnose anything, whether it's a serious disease or a international geopolitical threat, you will never solve it.

The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.

There's no substitute for taking a clear-eyed look at the threats we'll face and asking how our force will adapt to meet those threats.

The class has become over the years fairly large, running to three hundred or more, but I always insist upon reading all the student folklore collections myself. Although this is a tall order, I look forward to it because I learn so much from it.