Specs Quotes

I wrote a couple of scripts on spec that didn't get made but got some attention, and I then got offers to write professionally.

If you can't understand the spec for a new technology, don't worry: nobody else will understand it either, and the technology won't be that important.

Ball-tampering. There, I've said it. Things that shouldn't be said: the judge in the Saddam trial appears to be wearing comedy specs and moustache.

When I moved to Los Angeles, I wrote spec screenplays. I was really poor, and I thought I was just gonna do this for a while to make a little money so I could write novels. I thought movies were a second-class art form. I condescended to it - I didn't know enough to know it was really gonna be hard.

I'm not Akira Kurosawa. He used to write...He used to write a completely new spec script over a couple of nights. I'm not like that. It takes me a long time to put a film together that I want to make.

I think the essence of the argument has always been, first of all, the Guild doesn't want writing on spec. And that's been a major problem over the years. But obviously, to the young writer that's unfair and it's discriminatory, and it can be very hurtful to one's career.

It may seem like I'm overlooking a technical detail or a spec change, but at the end of the day I'm mostly going to be talking about the final result, with a few exceptions.

Excellence isn't about meeting the spec, it's about setting the spec.

I have a library room with four desks in it. On one of them is a spec, on one of them is a present work, on one of them is reading for a future work, on another desk is a novel I'm not doing until I'm a hundred and fifty, and things like that. But, contractually speaking, you just do one at a time when it's on and paid and live. You do your real day on one project and the rest is just literary life. Or intrusions.

Art is never defect-free. Things that are remarkable never meet spec, because that would make them standardized, not worth talking about.

Excellence isn’t about meeting the spec, it’s about setting the spec. It defines what the consumer sees as quality right this minute, and tomorrow, if you’re good, you’ll reset that expectation again

There are a lot of big spec houses now all across Connecticut, a lot of ostentatious showing of wealth.

Most aspiring screenwriters simply don't spend enough time choosing their concept. It's by far the most common mistake I see in spec scripts. The writer has lost the race right from the gate. Months - sometimes years - are lost trying to elevate a film idea that by its nature probably had no hope of ever becoming a movie.

I decided to write [Collateral Beauty] on my own which made it the first spec script I wrote in 11 years.

I basically wrote the code and the specs and documentation for how the client and server talked to each other.

I am seeing that Gandhi is looking through these specs that whether we have made India clean or not, what we have done and what we have done.

If car manufacturers made cars according to spec the same way software vendors make software according to spec, all five wheels would be of widely differing sizes, it would take one person to steer and another to work the pedals and yet another to operate the user-friendly menu-driven dashboard, and if it would not drive straight ahead without a lot of effort, civil engineers would respond by building spiraling roads around each city.

Writing a class without its contract would be similar to producing an engineering component (electrical circuit, VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) chip, bridge, engine...) without a spec. No professional engineer would even consider the idea.

The slight variations in extracting procedure cause many of the amygdalin (Vitamin B-17, Laetrile) molecules to change to a form unknown to nature(:) isomers...There are ...purveyors who label their 'iso-amygdalin' products 'amygdalin' contrary to all of the recognized specs...For commercial or political purposes, they certainly cannot justify such a fallacy...This scientific heresy and commercial fraud...(is) tremendously reducing the effectiveness of amygdalin therapy. ...To mislabel iso-amygdalin as amygdalin is scientifically, medically, and morally indefensible.

Trace the stars with your fingers in hopes you’ll connect the dots, but don’t get caught in the lines that aren’t really there ‘cause there is life in every breath you take and there is hope with every move you make, and every single mistake you think you’ve made should make you feel alive ‘cause you only have one chance to live in this spec we call life.

I woke up one morning to find I was famous. I bought a white Rolls-Royce and drove down Sunset Boulevard, wearing dark specs and a white suit, waving like the Queen Mum.

I'd say, don't listen to what anyone says: you're good. Go put your anorak on. Get your thick bottle-top specs. Draw your little cartoons and your comics and keep writing to the BBC.

You write a spec, and you pour your heart and soul and life into a spec, and you think that spec is the movie that's going to sell and get made... I've never heard of anybody that happened to. What happens is, you write a spec, people get it, they see your writing, they see you're good, they bring you into their office and they say, "Boy, that spec was really good - we'll never make that in a million years. We have rights to the board game of Monopoly. What do you think about a Monopoly movie?".

If I know what to spec, and I can measure it, and there are no unpredictable interdependencies between what you do and what I must do in response, then an economist would say that is sufficient information for a market to emerge between you and me.

And I've been wearing specs since I was three.

A lot of screenwriters have a drawer of unsold scripts that they cut their teeth on. I don't have one. Everything I've written, after my first spec, I wrote on assignment. Everything I've written was work.

The plain truth is we are going to die. Here I am, a teeny spec surrounded by boundless space and time, arguing with the whole of creation, shaking my fist, sputtering, growing even eloquent at times, and then-poof! I am gone. Swept off once and for all. I think that is very, very funny.

Providing accurate portrayals of characters is something I want to pay ample attention to. If I don’t stick to that thought, then we’d have to lower the quality or break the balance of the game. Something that goes way off spec could break the entire game.

The ascent to the divine Life is the human journey, the Work of works, the acceptable Sacrifice. This alone is man's real business in the world and the justification of his existence, without which he would only be an insect crawling among the ephemeral insects on a speck of surface mud and water which has managed to form itself amid the appalling immensities of the physical universe.