I think new plays are vastly more surprising and challenging and inspiring; I hear from audiences all the time that they are delighted when they see plays about the world we live in now, at this moment

That’s the beauty of what you want to achieve as an artist – seeing things in a different way. Kids are constantly saying things that are funny and surprising and their observations are just… you know, they’re like little artists themselves

Especially when you’re faced with hard times, you need to remember that life is either tragedy or comedy. For me, that’s what the magic is. Life has remarkable, surprising moments that get you through the hard times.

The only way of enduring one disaster after the next is to love the very idea of disaster: if we succeed, there are no further surprises, we are superior to whatever occurs, we are invincible victims.

I’ve always been surrounded by many great people and professors, but my family, especially my mom who was a teacher, was the person who encouraged me to study and pushed me to continue

One thing I believe that’s a key to success is celebrate your surroundings.

Since, during storms, flames leap from the humid vapors and dark clouds emit deafening noises, is it surprising the lightning, when it strikes the ground, gives rise to truffles, which do not resemble plants?

Out of my general world-pattern-trend studies there now comes strong evidence that nothing is going to be quite so surprising and abrupt in the future history of man as the forward evolution in the educational process.

I know enough of the world now to have almost lost the capacity of being much surprised by anything

The fact that my 15 minutes of fame has extended a little longer than 15 minutes is somewhat surprising to me and completely baffling to my wife.

It’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Hope not to succeed in borrowed plumes

Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.

The thing that’s been really surprising about the evolution of Facebook is – I think then, and I think now – that if we didn’t do this, someone else would have done it.