Jonathan Miller Quotes

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

Science is a self-sufficient activity.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

 

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

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.

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 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.

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