Jonathan Miller Quotes & Sayings

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. — Jonathan Miller

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. — Jonathan Miller

[On David Hume]
Although he never admitted to being an atheist as such, he was clearly and unquestionably the most vividly elegant skeptic of them all. — Jonathan Miller

Someone like Einstein was quite clearly a moralist, and he had a very highly developed political vision and was very spiritual in his way, and there are many biologists and physicists of the first order who are like that. — Jonathan Miller

People are already self-selected by the time they've decided to become scientists. — Jonathan Miller

Being a doctor has taught me a lot about directing. You're doing the same thing: You're reconstructing the manifold of behavior to the point where an audience says, yes, that's exactly like people I know. — Jonathan Miller

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? — Jonathan Miller

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. — Jonathan Miller

A lot of high-level scientists are in fact people of almost universal interest. — Jonathan Miller

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. — Jonathan Miller

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

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. — Jonathan Miller

The thing about science is that it's an accurate picture of the world. — Jonathan Miller

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

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. — Jonathan Miller

Science is a self-sufficient activity. — Jonathan Miller

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. — Jonathan Miller

As we know from the work of certain fundamental physicists, people like Einstein were very dependent upon conjuring up visual images in order to imagine things which otherwise were not easily formulated. — Jonathan Miller

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

Argumentative exhibitions bring issues to life in a way that very much irritates traditional curators who want to see their pictures valued for themselves. — Jonathan Miller

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. — Jonathan Miller

I wasn't driven into medicine by a social conscience but by rampant curiosity. — Jonathan Miller

People can't draw now and don't feel it's necessary. Art students don't seem to want to draw. — Jonathan Miller

I'm not really a Jew; just Jew-ish, not the whole hog. — Jonathan Miller