Jonathan Miller Quotations

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.

Since finding out what something is, is largely a matter of discovering what it is like, the most impressive contribution to the growth of intelligibility has been made by the application of suggestive metaphors

Now, that is in a way also what scientists are trying to do they're trying to get people to see that the world can be represented in an alternative way and that it's right.

People are already self-selected by the time they've decided to become scientists.

Supply is there, so if apartments are priced at market level, they are selling. If they're priced above market, they're not even getting shown.

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 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.

It felt like there would be no end,

I wasn't driven into medicine by a social conscience but by rampant curiosity.

Willingness to live on the ground floor is at a much higher level today than it was in the mid-1980s.

This year, we are certainly creating some pressure on the bottom line by this move in the US to broadband. That's a conscious decision. It is a classic short-term versus long-term trade-off.

Falling ill is not something that happens to us, it is a choice we make as a result of things happening to us

What people want is not what some would call imaginative and often austere productions but very lavish productions which cast back into the auditorium an image of their affluence.

What I should have been, you see, is a neurologist.

You have to look at the opera as not being about fidelity, but who you think you are and what happens when you pretend to be someone else and you discover you are that someone else.

Video consumption is exploding on-line and on-demand is going to be the dominant way to consume content.

Argumentative exhibitions bring issues to life in a way that very much irritates traditional curators who want to see their pictures valued for themselves.

Errors of taste are very often the outward sign of a deep fault of sensibility.

There's a disconnect between buyers and sellers. Sellers tend to be about at least six months behind the curve.

I spend a lot of my time trying to draw the attention of actors to the minute and subtle details of human behavior, which was the sort of thing I was looking at when I was a neurologist.

I see them as a trailblazer. They're really the first to do something of this magnitude, and for a first step, I think it's fantastic.

The thing about science is that it's an accurate picture of the world.

People can't draw now and don't feel it's necessary. Art students don't seem to want to draw.

The Olympics are perfect for this. Anything potentially that good is probably inevitable.

Across the country downtowns have been reinvigorated and become destination points for 24-hour living.

Speaking for me, it's just another one of those reporting requirements. It's not that big of a deal.

Despite some lingering trepidation due to mixed local, national and international economic conditions, the Manhattan housing market continued to improve.

The burden of the past is only, I think, oppressive when you've got to go on the experience of the avant garde.

You're seeing America Online and other AOL Time Warner divisions really working together now, ... You saw the starting point today.

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.

A lot of high-level scientists are in fact people of almost universal interest.

This made some buyers hesitate; there were people on the sidelines waiting to see what would happen,

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.

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?

It's not that the rich have become frugal,

It's amazing we have 4 million people who access us over broadband, because we make it difficult to access us over broadband,

I've learned more about leadership from these officers than I have in any class.

There was a negative swirl in the market; every pronouncement using the bubble term made buyers pause. We are not seeing prices fall; we are just seeing fewer sales.

It's not a buyer's market, but we're close to equilibrium.

I'm not really a Jew; just Jew-ish, not the whole hog.

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.

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.

Buyers became nervous. People are waiting to see what's going to happen.

He's trying to use the strategy of Greenspan-speak - to temper homebuyers' euphoria,

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.

You can't use a credit card on it. If you've got a dime, you can call.

The industry is in the middle of a truly massive change.

The idea of trying to seed them was very, very difficult.