Words matter. These are the best Jonathan Miller Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
It’s not that Shakespeare is frivolous, but you spend your time just getting people to dress up in other people’s costumes and pretending to be people that they’re not, and you think, after the years go by, well, what on earth was all that about?
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.
I’m not really a Jew; just Jew-ish, not the whole hog.
What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That’s what their substance is.
I became startled by the extraordinary difference between something whose surface is completely invisible which only makes itself present by virtue of what it reflects, and a window, which doesn’t make itself apparent at all, in the ideal case.
People are already self-selected by the time they’ve decided to become scientists.
You spend ten years of your life being trained to do one thing, and you’re being taught to think that it’s the most serious thing that anyone could possibly do, and then suddenly you find yourself doing something that in some respects is the epitome of frivolity.
Science is a self-sufficient activity.
I was trained as a neurologist, and then I went into the theater, and if you’re brought up to think of yourself as a biological scientist of some sort, pretty well everything else seems frivolous by comparison.
As we know from the work of certain fundamental physicists, people like Einstein were very dependent upon conjuring up visual images in order to imagine things which otherwise were not easily formulated.
What I should have been, you see, is 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.
I wasn’t driven into medicine by a social conscience but by rampant curiosity.
I’m not against asking the audience to work, but I think what you have now is a sort of gratuitous deconstruction as a result of a fashion of literary deconstructionism indicating that there are no meanings.
People can’t draw now and don’t feel it’s necessary. Art students don’t seem to want to draw.
