High Wire Act Quotes & Sayings

Acting is like a high wire act. Your margin for error is very slim. — Christine Baranski

But, Foley, my lad, it isn't beauty per se that makes wire-walking Zen or makes it art. It's the extremity of the risks that are assumed by each exquisite gesture, each impossible somersault. Here's a more extreme version of the dangerous beauty bullfights used to possess before the matadors became preening cowards and stacked the desk against the beasts. We only rise above mediocrity when there's something at stake, and I mean something more consequential than money or reputation. The great value of a high-wire act is that it has no practical value. The fact that so much skill and effort and courage can be directed into something so ostensibly useless is what makes it useful. That's what affords it the power to lift us out of context and carry us-elsewhere. — Tom Robbins

There is great power in the irresistible force of love. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Debatable how long the seduction took. The smarter the girl, the swifter these things go. Physical forwardness as intellectual high-wire act: the pleasure not of pleasure but of performance and revenge against the retainer, the flute, the stack of expectations. — Lauren Groff

The joy of art is particularly sweet, though, because it carries with it the threat of rejection, of failure, and of missed connections. It's precisely the high-wire act of "this might not work" that makes original art worth doing. — Seth Godin

The great thing about theater is that you have so much time to prepare, and to fail, before presenting it to the public. In film, the high-wire act seems to be that much farther up, and the net seems to be less there. — Chris Pine

I will persist until I succeed. I was not delivered into this world into defeat, nor does failure course in my veins. I am not a sheep waiting to be prodded by my shepherd. I am a lion and I refuse to talk, to walk, to sleep with the sheep. The slaughterhouse of failure is not my destiny. I will persist until I succeed. — Og Mandino

Nietzsche [10w]
Zarathustra's high-wire act is over;
the circus has left town. — Beryl Dov

Designing is a lot like a high-wire act - if the tightrope walker is only six inches off the ground, where's the excitement? — Douglas Wilson

Carter is doing a high-wire act over a cesspool, preaching all the way. Sinclair Lewis, thou shouldst be living in this hour. We have a Warren Harding impersonating Elmer Gantry. — Jimmy Carter

The only TV I would be interested in exploring would be live television. There's no substitute for a team of artists performing at their peak live when failure is possible. It's a high-wire act. That excites me. — Francis Ford Coppola

You maniacs! You blew it all up! Goddam you all. Goddam you all to hell. — George R. Taylor

What can I recommend? Trust your story; trust yourself; trust your readers - but wisely. Trust watchfully, not blindly. Trust flexibly, not rigidly. The whole thing, writing a story, is a high-wire act - there you are out in midair walking on a spiderweb line of words, and down in the darkness people are watching. What can you trust but your sense of balance? — Ursula K. Le Guin

A novel is a great act of passion and intellect, carpentry and largess. From the very beginning, I wrote to explain my own life to myself, and I invited readers who chose to make the journey with me to join me on the high wire. — Pat Conroy

I quickly learned that motherhood was a high wire act sometimes performed without a net. — Marita Golden

I'm not an artist, and I want to take risks, and when the possibility of failure occurs, it's because the idea is all exciting or interesting as a high wire act, and sometimes you've got to fall off, just by virtue of the fact that you're constantly trying to evolve and do new things. — Peter Morgan

Though I had been nearly two years on Winter I was still far from being able to see the people of the planet through their own eyes. I tried to, but my efforts took the form of self-consciously seeing a Gethenian first as a man, then as a woman, forcing him into those categories so irrelevant to his nature and so essential to my own. — Ursula K. Le Guin

When all is a facade, wound within webs of deception, the truth is what you make of it. — R.A. Salvatore