Surface Quotes

I've been taking my time now between projects looking for stuff that has a little bit more substance, that isn't surface. Some of the films that I've done in the past really were surface.

I started to itch to do a play again and 'Macbeth' came to the surface in my mind. I never thought I would do it in a conventional way. A sweaty Macbeth with blood on his arms coming in fresh from the battle doesn't interest me.

And that format was - we'd been using that format, I guess, since the late '70s, and it was starting to get very predictable. In other words, certain songs would surface in the same points in the set every so often; it was like rotation.

There is no way to penetrate the surface of life but by attacking it earnestly at a particular point.

From birth, man carries the weight of gravity on his shoulders. He is bolted to earth. But man has only to sink beneath the surface and he is free.

The closer the bird is to the surface of the water, the firmer and more inelastic is the uplift of the rising air. The bird appears to almost feel the surface with the tip of its weather wing.

If you scratch below the surface and ask what really makes me tick, it's the liberalism of trying to promote freedom and opportunity. Promoting social mobility is one of the keys to that.

In the surface of the paper there is only length and width-there is no such thing as thickness.

Every artist undresses his subject, whether human or still life. It is his business to find essences in surfaces, and what more attractive and challenging surface than the skin around a soul?

It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page.

Something pretty... that's just the surface. People worry so much about aging, but you look younger if you don't worry about it.

People say I make strange choices, but they're not strange for me. My sickness is that I'm fascinated by human behavior, by what's underneath the surface, by the worlds inside people.

Playing live for a good cause is something I like to do. I like the response of the Indian people, I like their depth and the way they look beyond the surface of things.

The underlying process in Northern music tends to be slower and continuous, whatever's happening on the surface; in Southern music the underlying process is always faster.

I prefer neurotic people. I like to hear rumblings beneath the surface.

We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part.

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

It's also ironic that in the old days of tape and tape hiss and vinyl records and surface noise, we were always trying to get records louder and louder to overcome that.

Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.

For years, I've been wondering what could happen to nuclear submarines when they dive and disappear from the surface of the earth for months, without a trace. No one really knows where they are.

What is real is not the external form, but the essence of things... it is impossible for anyone to express anything essentially real by imitating its exterior surface.

Sometimes I enjoy just photographing the surface because I think it can be as revealing as going to the heart of the matter.

From behind the Iron Curtain, there are signs that tyranny is in trouble and reminders that its structure is as brittle as its surface is hard.

You have to know how to use the accident, how to recognise it, how to control it, and ways to eliminate it so that the whole surface looks felt and born all at once.

The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colours breaking through.

We who in engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive.

I was a terrible Sugar Babies addict, so I had more cavities than the surface of the moon.

Just under the surface I shall be, all together at first, then separate and drift, through all the earth and perhaps in the end through a cliff into the sea, something of me. A ton of worms in an acre, that is a wonderful thought, a ton of worms, I believe it.

Well, actually I don't care what surface I'm playing on.

Today 80 percent of all the oil that comes out of the Gulf is from 1,000 feet or more and today almost a third of it is more than 5,000 feet below the surface. What hasn't happened is the safety and the ability to respond to a negative event such as this blowout, has been far outrun by the technology of drilling itself. We need to close that gap.