I’ll tell you what I love about directing: the surprise. You never know what’s going to happen with your piece until an audience weighs in.
I once threw myself a surprise party on Twitter because I was lonely. It was awesome. Thousands of people showed up and then Wil Wheaton and I made a bunch of monkey-ponies. It was the most successful surprise party I’ve ever thrown in my life. It was also the only surprise party I’ve ever thrown in my whole life.
I’m writing a new love story, set in eastern North Carolina. Surprise, surprise, huh?
It does surprise me that intelligent people in the 21st century could claim that if you respond to the terrorists with force, you spawn terrorism, but if you appease them, you somehow tame them. This argument, as I said, is very interesting, and very surprising.
Everybody always talks about it, about how you don’t know love until you meet your baby, and you really feel that. There are no words. It was a really wonderful surprise. And there is no way to prepare yourself for the sleep deprivation and what comes with it.
My name is Bernard Jeffrey McCullough, but people know me as Bernie Mac. My mama, God rest her soul – she used to call me Beanie. Used to say, ‘Don’t you worry about Beanie. Beanie gonna be just fine. Beanie gonna surprise everyone.’
Well the beauty of ‘Iyanla: Fix My Life’ is that men are in every show. To our surprise, some of the deepest healing demonstrations have been with the men – the sons, the fathers, the husbands – because they agree to participate with the wife or the daughter or whatever it is we are looking at, and it is there.
I like to surprise people. I try to take risks.
It’s very strange how electronic music formatted itself and forgot that its roots are about the surprise, freedom, and the acceptance of every race, gender, and style of music into this big party. Instead, it started to become this electronic lifestyle which also involved the glorification of technology.
It did surprise me to be made captain. The obvious issue is my English. It’s not that great, so communicating with players is not always easy. But I am thriving on the responsibility, both on and off the field.
Many of my poems try to use a comic element to reach a place that isn’t comic at all. The comic element works as a surprise. It is unexpected and energizing.
There’s not much TV these days where you really get that element of surprise. There are so many spoilers all the time.
What gives me the most hope every day is God’s grace; knowing that his grace is going to give me the strength for whatever I face, knowing that nothing is a surprise to God.
The rules of suspense are that you do know, and you just don’t know when. In the Hitchcock rules of suspense, you are supposed to know that there is a bomb on the bus that might blow up, and then it becomes very tense – but if you don’t know that there’s a bomb and it just blows up, then it’s just a surprise.
When you can surprise yourself, you’re truly acting.
Would it be a surprise if entrepreneurs recoil at the thought of consciously courting any person who has more power and money than they have?
I always knew I would be successful. So there was no element of surprise.
A lot of people say I am not tall and I am small guy. But I jump very high. I surprise a lot of people when I go for the corner kicks.
Actually, I didn’t make the claim that Ruby follows the principle of least surprise. Someone felt the design of Ruby follows that philosophy, so they started saying that. I didn’t bring that up, actually.
I remember being asked for the first time about my race, and it really took me by surprise, just that it was a point that needed to be raised – and then I quickly realised that it was a point that everyone wanted to talk about!
It’s great to surprise people. If you do the same thing all over again, which people expect you to do, they’re going to get bored.
The most romantic thing someone did was surprise me at the airport, after being away for 3 months in Los Angeles. You always see people with signs, and you’re like, ‘Isn’t that lovely?’ and then you see your own name on one – that isn’t a taxi driver’s! I was very impressed.
The best actors just stay in the moment,and whatever happens in the scene is a genuine surprise. You really do not know what’s going to happen next. But living that out in life is very dangerous because it throws you into a place where you don’t know if you’re going to survive.
I wish I could relive those days when I was 8 and my mother bought all the gifts I gave to people. I loved watching people open them. It was a surprise for me and then.
I love to be scared. Not, ‘Hey, I think I smell smoke…’ scared, but creepy, paranoid, what’s-that-out-there-in-the-dark, ghost story scared. It’s no surprise that I was the girl who got invited to the slumber parties because I could be counted on to tell a tale to scare the bejesus out of you.
You never want your second act or the whole movie to just be this relentless march towards its goal. You want things to take the audience by surprise.
I still think in this country, and this might surprise you, the one thing that George Bush said as president that I do agree with, I love that phrase, ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations.’
There’s nothing I really wanted to record more than Bach. It’s wonderful music. It’s – on a grand scale, there’s a lot to it. There are – I can work on it for a long time and keep discovering more things, you know, that surprise me every time.
It might surprise people to know that the person who convinced me to write the third memoir – ‘The Hardcore Diaries’ – was actually Vince McMahon.
For me, what is most important is the element of surprise. If I can surprise you with every film of mine, that is exactly what I am trying to do.
I realize that sometimes I get bothered when I see the world acting like the world. Did you hear what I said? The world is supposed to act like the world, and God tells us that every generation gets more wicked, so why the surprise? Maybe we have some word to swallow ourselves.
Humor’s always been the problem of my work, hasn’t it? When working, I feel satisfied when I surprise myself. And when I surprise myself, I wind up laughing.
There is no surprise more magical than the surprise of being loved: It is God’s finger on man’s shoulder.
Wherever we go, across the Pacific or Atlantic, we meet, not similarity so much as ‘the bizarre’. Things astonish us, when we travel, that surprise nobody else.
Terror works by surprise.
When we wrote ‘Avenue Q,’ we worked hard to create something that could be funny and satirical but also had some surprise moments of heart, moments when the music itself could become a central player and create something sweet and moving.
The individual can maintain himself in a society definitely organized only through possessing an equally definite mental and moral constitution. This is what the neuropath lacks. His state of disturbance causes him to be constantly taken by surprise by circumstances.
It came as a great surprise to receive an MBE and it is a true honor for me and my family.
Scratch an artist and you surprise a child.
About 100 things that your kid will do that will surprise you and break your heart and it will be a combination of fact based therapy, medically advised kinds of passages accompanied by celebrity anecdotes and just some funny stuff to lighten the load.
There are things that are really disappointing about being an actress in Hollywood that surprise me all the time.
I wouldn’t say that I relax and enjoy anything. But I think my pessimism helps. I never really expect anything good to happen, so when it does, it’s a nice surprise.
I’ve been acting for 27 years, and anonymity has always been a part of what I do. Of course you get recognised every now and again, but ‘Homeland’ pushed me into a completely different strata, and that took me by surprise.
Jury instructions are so numerous and complex, it’s a wonder jurors ever wade through them. And so it should come as no surprise that they can sometimes get stuck along the way. The instruction on circumstantial evidence is confusing even to lawyers. And reasonable doubt? That’s the hardest, most elusive one of all.
A good, sympathetic review is always a wonderful surprise.
Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.
Pop shouldn’t be a comfortable slipper. It should shock and surprise you and confront your expectations.
The idea that ‘if you don’t like how things are going, you can just leave’ is so ingrained in Texas, the secession movement is no surprise.
The Padma Shri came as a very pleasant surprise. I am deeply honoured. I don’t know what I did to deserve it, but I must have done something right to be honoured by our government.
I find myself eating different kinds of chicken each and every day, even if it’s by surprise.
I prefer to surprise myself as I’m writing. I’m not interested in it if I already know where it’s going. So I have only the most general sense of what I’m doing when I start a story. I sometimes have a destination in mind, but how the story is going to go from Point A to Point Z is something I make up as I go along.
That was a surprise. I just had wished that Wil Wheaton was there. He was missing from the last show and it would have been nice if everyone could have been there.
