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I realised that all one really had to do was just observe. Observe and slightly exaggerate, and you had comedy. Instead of creating a mythical premise for a stupid joke, I found playing off truth got the best result.
Sep 10, 2025
I must admit I suffered a bit when I first came to England. But then I realised that there was nothing to be intimidated by, everybody had two legs.
I had become conscious of my physicality, aware of my presence and open to the ugly truths of the world. At the age of thirteen, I realised that there was a danger in innocence and beauty, and I could not live with both.
Being from a minority culture, I realised the importance of looking at non-Western cultures in a positive way.
The biological task of science is to provide the fully developed human individual with as perfect a means of orientating himself as possible. No other scientific ideal can be realised, and any other must be meaningless.
It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realise his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realise their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realised, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other than itself.
I soon realised that what had happened on a small scale cannot necessarily be repeated on a larger scale. The stones were so big that the amount of heat required was prohibitively expensive and wasteful.
My hope that the Church will emerge as a strong leader in society is just that a hope. What I described in The Catholic Moment is not a prophecy but the outline of a possibility. There are no guarantees that my hopes expressed in The Catholic Moment will ever be realised.
Then, when I had the opportunity to go to Africa and visit the villages, I heard the real, raw, true rhythms and realised the origins of the old Negro spirituals I grew up with in the South.
When I turned 36 I realised - the likelihood is that in four years time I'll be 40.
Once I grew up and realised 'What am I doing?' I started re-listening to the music I was playing and I realised there was so much finesse - it was dynamic and simple but I wanted to be authentic to the original songs.
I knew nothing about football, then someone showed me a film of Petit and I realised how interesting the game could be. He is divine. When I met him I could barely speak, he was so gorgeous. Women will love that show.
I think I was a feminist before the word was invented. By the time I came across feminist books by American or European writers, I realised that there was an articulate way or a language to express all these feelings that I had had for years and years and so I became a raging feminist as a young woman.
While I was writing Wild Swans I thought the famine was the result of economic mismanagement but during the research I realised that it was something more sinister.
I've now realised for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest.
I realised what a powerful position you are in if you own the rights to your film because then you control the distribution and I ended up getting 25 million viewers for McLibel and that's what it's all about for me.
When I realised I wasn't Michael Jackson and I was this 10 year old boy growing up in the suburbs, I was devastated
In loving his own productive, generative, generous love, God loves all those ways in which that love can be realised in creation.
It's much harder to provide a great customer service than I would have ever realised. It's much more art than science in some of these other areas and not just about the facts but about how you are conveying them.
I was listening to a lot of hip hop, music like Public Enemy that was about raising consciousness, and I realised I could feed that directly into my work, using images in a way that was a bit like sampling - taking images from diverse places, exploring the contradictions without trying to hide the seams.
The great writers to whom the world owes what religious liberty it possesses, have mostly asserted freedom of conscience as an indefeasible right, and denied absolutely that a human being is accountable to others for his religious belief. Yet so natural to mankind is intolerance in whatever they really care about, that religious freedom has hardly anywhere been practically realised, except where religious indifference, which dislikes to have its peace disturbed by theological quarrels, has added its weight to the scale.
If a thing happens once, it can happen again. If any human being has ever realised perfection, we too can do so. If we cannot become perfect here and now, we never can in any state or heaven or condition we may imagine.
Her absence had felt like torture--almost a form of personal punishment. He had nobody to discuss his feelings with, and for the first time he realised with appalling clarity what a destructive hold she had over him.
It's all about the climate. I had a long discussion about it when I went to Scotland to see Andy Roxburgh. I worked with a Scottish youth side and had them do the same drills I would do in Italy. I realised that, between the wind, the rain and the cold, there was no way they could do it. How can you possibly teach anybody anything in those conditions? To me, it's pretty obvious and it explains why Brazilians are more technical than Europeans and, in Italy, the further south you go the more technical they are.
Not a single thought managed to take shape in her mind: for the likeness of this day to the last seemed to her the clearest proof that it would be another quite useless day, a day she would gladly have done without. For a moment she thought that a day like this would be pointless for anyone on earth, then abruptly changed her mind as she realised that thousands of women, after a hard week's work, or a family quarrel, or even just after catching a cold, would envy her just for having the leisure to rest in comfort.
When I was just about to leave, and when I realised that I wasn't going to wake up in the morning and do this again - that was probably the hardest thing for me. Leaving this family that I'd created on set, with all the cast and the crew was very sad for me.
I was working with stem cells as part of a NASA programme. We realised that the science of stem-cell proliferation was also fundamental to cancer cells when cancer enters the phase of metastasis.
I was raised in California during the Second World War and into the '50s and everything was fine, everything was great. The sun always shone, everybody looked healthy and wore ties and smoked in restaurants, and there were cars for everybody - except us, because I came from a lower class neighbourhood. But [in France] I realised there was a different point of view, so when I came back to America a year and a half later I was much more focused on my own country culturally and politically.
With respect to the use of this sparkling coloured material (butterfly wings around 1955, fh) - the constituent parts of which remain indistinguishable - with the aim of producing a very vivid effect of scintillation, I realised that, for me, this responds to needs of the same order as those that formerly led me, in many drawings and paintings, to organize my lines and patches of colour so that the objects represented would meld into everything around them, so that the result would be a sort of continuous, universal soup with an intensive flavour of life.
And that's when I realised that a mans' ego was like fruit; easily bruised.
I realised nothing was permanently broken, I needed to take control and make changes.
I was so tired, wasn't having fun any more, and wasn't sure if I wanted to do this any longer. So I turned my phone off and sorted my head out. It was the opposite of a breakdown really, it was a break-up - I got rid of all the idiots, realised my job was supposed to be fun, and got on with my life.
The moment I realised that my history was an excuse for nothing, was the moment I was freed from my history. The great danger of history is that we use it as an excuse and remain trapped in it. I cannot blame my history for anything, and therefore I have to have high standards for myself.
Science is absolutely incomplete unless and until the scientists are Realised Souls. Medicine is incomplete, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, everything is incomplete unless and until you know the Divine laws.
Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realised that the imagery in my mind wasn't insanity. Surrealism to me is reality.
Value investing is the discipline of buying shares at a significant discount from their current underlying values and holding them until more of their value is realised. The element of a bargain is the key to the process.
At the age of five or six I just used to kick the ball with both feet. I wasn't very good to start with but I practised and practised. Once I finally got it, it was an unbelievable sensation. It was then that I realised that if you work at something, it pays off.
I don't want awards. I am not saying this like it's a case of sour grapes. It isn't. I have been to a couple of award functions, and I soon realised that it doesn't give me the kick that it does to others.
Then suddenly something just kicked me. I kind of woke up and realised that I was in a different atmosphere than you normally are. My immediate reaction was to back off, slow down.
I'm quite arty. I didn't know whether to become an artist or musician but I realised I could paint with music. All my songs have colours.
I never allowed myself the luxury of those brilliant, beautiful colors until I went to India and saw people walking around in them or dragging them in the mud. I realised they were not so artificial.
I lived with a coffee farmer called Dukale on a trip I made with World Vision to Ethiopia, and realised there's no good reason for the disparity in opportunity around the world.
Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realised; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.
I can't even begin to describe how I miss him. He always supported me in everything I did. He was a very wise man and I realised at an early age I could learn a lot from him. He always gave me the right answer. But above all he was a very easy-going guy and all he wanted was to be my best friend. I'm an only child and so he shared everything with me. Of course he was very young to die and I was very young to lose a father. But there was nothing left unsaid between us.
I was amazed by this person who, even though she had everything, would go to feed the homeless and visit sick children and Aids victims. It was like a fairy tale. Who was she really? Why did she do this? She was trying to find love. I wanted the world to see her kindness, her humility: I think she realised that would be her way.
I wanted to write a book that imagined where advances in the study of genetics might lead us. Holman was the first character who came to me: I envisaged the misshapen offspring of beautiful, wealthy parents. Then I realised that he bore a striking resemblance to Toulouse-Lautrec. I developed that, made Holman an alcoholic who lives among hookers, an artist tortured by his disability.
The Tories had the legal right to demand extra meetings of the council but I could decide when they would be held and always called them for Friday afternoons, knowing that three or four of the richer Tories went to the country early and were not prepared to stay in the city beyond lunchtime. I realised that nothing in politics is new when I read in Suetonius's The Twelve Caesars that Julius Caesar pulled the same trick when reactionaries in the senate were making his life difficult.
Throughout the history of the Internet, most of the innovation has come as a by-product of efforts to facilitate communication within social groups of various kinds (academics, bloggers, peer-to-peer file sharing), rather than as the result of profit-oriented investment. Rather than taking the lead, the business and government sectors have adopted innovations developed in Internet communities, and realised significant productivity gains as a result.
When I was 18 and not sure whether I wanted to be an actor, I realised that a playwright has no voice without an actor. That's my reason for acting: to get that character as right as possible for my writer. And I have never changed my philosophy.
I think the first time I realised Downton Abbey was a hit was when I was sitting in a tea shop in New York and the couple next to me were talking about Downton Abbey, and then they recognised me.