What if you get a job transfer? What if you lose your job? What if you have kids and you need a bigger home? Things change. You always have to be ready to roll with it.
You go to the edit room and see one scene which has come out fantastically, and you feel the film will set records. By evening, you look at the budget figures or something that hasn’t worked out and ask yourself – what if this doesn’t work?
I always say I enjoyed my time at Spurs and I improved as a player so I don’t look back and think ‘what if?’
It strikes me as very odd for someone to think, ‘You know what, if I put on a bikini, I may shift some more records,’ but it happens. If people are comfortable with that, fine, but it’s not something that would ever cross my mind.
What if Woody Allen called me and said, I’m working on this movie and there’s a really divine role for you. We want exactly you! It would be such a fantasy. Forget it! My idol, Woody Allen!
Sitting still, a person produces about 100 watts of heat. What if you could use that to charge your cell phone?
What, if as said, man is a bubble.
I wake up sometimes, and I have this limp, and I’m, like, What if someone chases me, and it’s on a bad-knee day? I need to be able to get away.
Some authors, when starting a novel, imagine a place first. Others, a character starts taking shape in their head. I start with a hook, a situation, a ‘what if.’
The belief is growing on me that the disease is communicated by the bite of the mosquito… She always injects a small quantity of fluid with her bite – what if the parasites get into the system in this manner.
Being a popular director or actor’s son can be frightening in this industry. What if you are not able to make it?
The counter-argument would be, so what if my sexual relationships are superficial, one can still have satisfying and rewarding relationships with friends, or parents, or siblings, or whatever.
One of my mom’s favorite movies growing up was ‘Big’ with Tom Hanks. I thought, ‘Oh, OK, what if we do something like that but not like that. Something more modern, with a different perspective, and maybe with an all-black cast.’
What if Shakespeare had had a test audience for Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet?
Anybody out there who has had a situation where they’ve had to struggle – when they want something so badly, but they can’t quite get it – I am living and breathing proof that if you endure, if you push yourself, if you strive to be your best, no matter what, if you keep on working hard, then good things can happen.
I’ve always considered myself a little more fluid along the spectrum. So even being called bisexual… I remember, in my early twenties, I was like, ‘But bisexual means I can only like girls and guys. What if I like something else?’
If there’s an audience, I think they’re going to expect me to be funny. But what if I’m not funny? What if I fail?
I thought, ‘Let’s make it a check list. What if I got my education even though I lost my mother, even though my dad is in a shelter?’ and looking at these things as hurdles to go over. I could inspire myself.
But for me, at one point I was like, ‘Why do I want to make films that people want to walk out of?’ What if I actually want people to engage and have a good time?
The workplace can be a good place to find opportunities to socialise, but what if you don’t meet any like-minded people there, or what if you work alone? Is it, somewhat counter-intuitively, easier to find yourself lonely in a city than in a small town or village?
In the United States alone, 450 billion square feet of glass facade is produced every year. What if we could take this chance to use the glass to harness solar energy and allow the architecture to respond to the light and heat of the sun, to create photosynthesis and generate solar energy?
Here’s a thought: what if we ban the word ‘healthy food’ from our culinary vocabulary? I’m not talking about banning foods that are considered healthy. I’m talking about changing the way we think about food overall.
I’m pretty restless in bed, so I can lie there for a couple of hours and be like, ‘Hey, that happened today. What if that happened at a zoo?’ I’ll jot the idea down. Then I’m like, ‘All right, so now that it’s a zoo, that penguin’s loose,’ or, whatever. I usually start with broad ideas.
I always feel trepidation at the beginning of every project. I worry about so many things. Time to get it right, the skill to do it justice, the will to finish. I also worry about more mundane things, like what if my computer crashes and I’ve forgotten to back up the manuscript?
I think I became a writer because of my love of stories and an inability to stop asking, ‘What if?’
My performances in auditions were so inept that I hardly got any jobs in film or TV. I just could not learn the lines and the thought of doing theatre terrified me. What if I forgot my lines in the middle of a scene with an entire audience watching?
At first, I see pictures of a story in my mind. Then creating the story comes from asking questions of myself. I guess you might call it the ‘what if – what then’ approach to writing and illustration.
What if we treat the high-rise like a mountain, or we have gardens in the sky, or waterfalls? I think that’s the most challenging thing I want to try in my architecture.
I think there is often a ‘what if’ proposition that gets me thinking about all my novels.
I knew I could make people laugh but I was frightened of doing it. I thought, ‘What if I’m crap, what if I’m no good at it?’, but I knew I should have a go and shouldn’t sit inside watching other people do it on television.
I had grand visions of being in professional sports. But when reality set in, I went, ‘Oh, OK. I’ll just move to Hollywood and be an actor.’ I didn’t want to look back on my life and wonder, ‘What if I had done this? Or I had done that?’
I’ve always been one of those people who wondered ‘What if…’
Many of my books come from what if questions that I can’t answer, things that I’m worried about as either a woman, a wife, a mom, an American.
What are the two biggest things online? Selfies and emojis. We’re combining them. Instead of sending some character that means nothing with a hat – what if it was your face doing something? Me-moji.
It’s hard when you lose your best players. It’s tough. I’m not going to lie. It makes you think, ‘What if they didn’t leave?’
Do any of us actually want to live in a world where your boss can decide that he or she is morally opposed to mental health care? What if your employer was morally opposed to getting x-rays or antibiotics? How about just being forced to disclose your private medical information to your employer?
What if I couldn’t handle people’s opinions of me? I know that shouldn’t dictate a person’s degree of peace or happiness in life, but the problem is, I chose a business saturated in judgment.
So what if America loses its empire? We never should have had one in the first place.
Your parents and people close to you, whenever you want to do something or you want to follow a dream, they’ll try and stop you. It’s not out of their hating, it’s just protection. They want to try and preserve you. Like ‘oh what If he fails?’ From the culture we’re from, they want to protect you.
I love kids. But that’s such a big commitment. And it seems long-term. It seems like a commitment that you have to stick with. And I just don’t know if I can – it’s too risky. Like, what if I don’t like the kid?
Sometimes I think about, ‘What if I’m not the person everyone idealizes me to be? Maybe I’m just a regular old Joe. What if I can’t live up to all these expectations? Maybe I’m just not who they think I am or who they want me to be.
The one thing humans can’t control is time, but what if one has the power to do so is the core theme of ’24.’
It’s very dangerous to wave to people you don’t know because what if they don’t have hands? They’ll think you’re cocky.
You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do – and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time.
I’ve been telling my students, ‘Imitate, imitate.’ And they say, ‘Well, what if I plagiarize, or what if I’m not original? I want to be myself.’ And I always tell them, ‘Your self will shine through’… If you allow yourself to feel deeply and honestly, what you say won’t be like anyone else.
If you’re going to figure something out, study ethics. You can ask What’s the answer? What’s Right and Wrong? What I learned is that nobody knows the answer and there is no Right and Wrong. So I’m incapable of becoming a fundamentalist because there are no absolutes, there’s always a what if.
You know what, if Rick Rubin would produce another Geto Boys album I’d do it.
I wish the media and people that work in media would realize sometimes – and I know it doesn’t pay your bills – but sometimes just sit back and think, like, ‘Man, what if this was my child? And somebody was doing this to them? And they had to go through it? If somebody bashed them like this?’
What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book – a key part of our planet’s cultural legacy.
