Tweaking Quotes & Sayings

Everything is a drug. Family, art, causes, new shoes ... We're all just tweaking our chem to avoid the void. — Joss Whedon

Where I feel the most productive and engaged is when I'm buried in code, buried in some project, tweaking some designs. I'm certainly introverted. — David Karp

Rees maintains that six numbers in particular govern our universe, and that if any of these values were changed even very slightly things could not be as they are. For example, for the universe to exist as it does requires that hydrogen be converted to helium in a precise but comparatively stately manner - specifically, in a way that converts seven one-thousandths of its mass to energy. Lower that value very slightly - from 0.007 percent to 0.006 percent, say - and no transformation could take place: the universe would consist of hydrogen and nothing else. Raise the value very slightly - to 0.008 percent - and bonding would be so wildly prolific that the hydrogen would long since have been exhausted. In either case, with the slightest tweaking of the numbers the universe as we know and need it would not be here. I — Bill Bryson

'Johnny' was a coping mechanism who could take those things which could have ordinarily destroyed me, by tweaking my past and throwing it back out there, getting laughs from things that would have otherwise upset me. — Johnny Vegas

It's never something huge that changes the everything, but instead the tiniest of details, irrevocably tweaking the balance of the universe while you're busy focusing on the big picture. — Sarah Dessen

The worst possible thing you can do when you're down in the dumps, tweaking, vaporous with victimized self-righteousness, or bored, is to take a walk with dying friends. They will ruin everything for you. First of all, friends like this may not even think of themselves as dying, although they clearly are, according to recent scans and gentle doctors' reports. But no, they see themselves as fully alive. They are living and doing as much as they can, as well as they can, for as long as they can. They ruin your multitasking high, the bath of agitation, rumination, and judgment you wallow in, without the decency to come out and just say anything. They bust you by being grateful for the day, while you are obsessed with how thin your lashes have become and how wide your bottom. — Anne Lamott

Therefore, we read the Bible selectively. We pick a text here and there to fit our felt needs. This is like a doctor who forgets how to write prescriptions for the best antibiotics because every- body seems healthy, and he has spent the last decades tweaking good health with hip-hop exercise videos, unaware that pestilence is at the door. It's like the soldier who forgets how to use his weapons because the times seem peaceful, and he has spent the last decades doing relief work and teaching the children how to play games. — John Piper

When I'm in the game [softball], it's not so much mechanics. It's more of just trusting my teammates, trusting myself, trusting my preparation that we've put in to get there. When you're in the game, it's go-mode. There's going to be times when you're tweaking things but when you're in that game mode, you just want to think about that one next pitch. — Jennie Finch

When I'm not writing or tweaking my computer, I do embroidery. When I'm not plunging into the past, tweaking, or embroidering, I'm reading books about history, computers, or embroidery. — Lynn Abbey

I acknowledge the challenge of believing in a supernatural divinity. After all, in the natural a rock is a rock; a desk is a desk; my skin is my skin. Or are they? That rock you pick up and feel on your skin and place on the desk is 99.9% empty space - between atoms; as is your skin and the desk. So, perhaps it is our perception of the natural or "real" world that needs tweaking, not the supernatural. — Charles F. Glassman

With the classical stuff, I've always been better at the big brushstrokes and broad textures than spending ages honing a chord, or tweaking a sample. — Anna Meredith

I always thought that being at Time and tweaking your bosses and exploiting your expense account was just fun. Just joyous. — Joel Stein

You don't get a chance to sit back and relax because this is the point where we're tweaking things to see what works and what doesn't work; so the level of concentration is very focused. But who wouldn't be happy with this? It's a great opportunity and a really great piece of writing. I'm just really very fortunate. — Sean Mahon

Now, if you make fun of my plan I'll give you bad coffee for a week, and then where are you, sir? cried Mrs. Jo, tweaking him by the ear just as if he was one of the boys. — Louisa May Alcott

You're part of the extended family, Sheriff," Barb told him, tweaking his ear. She was cooling down. "And besides, we may need you on Saturday. If the little bastards get rowdy, you can legally off'm with your Uzi." She pointed to the small revolver Pierce sometimes carried in a discreet (I daresay tasteful) shoulder holster of burnished tan leather. — Michael Craft

We've got so many different cultural groups in my family that I've had to learn to accommodate them in different ways. My father speaks different to my mum. My mum speaks different to my grandmother. Everybody speaks different, so you find you start tweaking your language to be more accessible to people. — Trevor Noah

That's the sound design. I watched it sixty times because we were constantly tweaking. The same thing comes twice, right? Once it comes in the beginning when he's about to discover that he needs to come out and one is the dream where he's flattered (??) and then he comes out. The last one, instead of going bigger, we made it smaller. We removed elements and thinned it out. So it doesn't drive him. He drives the music rather than the other way around. — A.R. Rahman

Don't talk to your horse, dear. People are watching," Pauline said quietly.
Halt turned a perplexed look toward her. "How do you know when I'm doing that?"
She smiled at him. "Your nose twitches."
... On the way, Kane [stableboy] kept glancing surreptitiously at the famous Ranger, fascinated by the fact that he kept staring down his nose and tweaking its tip between his forefinger and thumb. — John Flanagan

One of my favorite things to do is formulate powers for a character, then come up with their corresponding weaknesses and liabilities. And I delight in world-building: melding the supernatural with the natural, then tweaking and polishing until it feels organic. — Kresley Cole

I'm a passionate believer in revision, and a lot of my writing gets done during revision process. It isn't just tweaking: I tend to break it apart and remake it every time I do a new draft. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

I don't believe that recordings should sound radically better than the artist, I think that's dishonest. For example, I'm not a great singer but if I spent enough time tweaking my vocals, I could sound like one. But I don't, what you hear is pretty much what I sing. — Malcolm Wilson

There was an old joke about being left on a deserted island with an editor. You are starving. All you have left is a glass of orange juice. Days pass. You are near death. You are about to drink the juice when the editor grabs the glass from your hand and pees into it. You look at him, stunned . "There," the editor says, handing you the glass. "It just needed a little tweaking. — Harlan Coben

There is small merit in mocking goodness, tweaking charity; it is much more comic to deprive people of their petty little existence for no reason at all, for a lark. — Jacques Rigaut

I guess that's a big problem with working with computers - you've got the luxury to keep tweaking the songs until the last second and beyond. So I don't think I'll ever have that feeling, unless I'm the one finishing the track. — David Macklovitch

O gouvernment francais, I think it was not very clever of You to put this terrible doll in La Ferte; for when Governments are found dead there is always a little doll on top of them, pulling and tweaking with his little hands to get back at the microscopic knife which sticks firmly in the quiet meat of their hearts. — E. E. Cummings

When you're shooting a network television show it inevitably starts airing a few episodes in, and depending on the ratings and the response from the public, you find yourself tweaking your performance or the scripts go in a different direction. — Lizzy Caplan

I learned to move silently in the background, a dirty, neglected little kid with no voice, no wants, and who made no trouble so as not to call the wrath of the eight or so tweaking adults who lived there down on me. I drifted, faded, and became a listless, ghostlike scavenger who took what she could get. I lived mostly in my head and for a while actually convinced myself that I was a survivor of one of those catastrophic earthquakes or tornadoes I used to see on the Weather Channel,a dazed, bewildered, and emotionless girl picking her way through an endless landscape of foul and stinking rubble to try and come out on the other side. — Laura Wiess

Any self-help program that discourages me from thinking for myself, that is, from tweaking what I've learned to understand myself is suspect. Growth is all about thinking creatively, and I can't very well do that if I take on the role of parrot. — Dannye Williamsen

Specifically, my favorite tool in Java is hot code swapping in debug mode, meaning I can edit the code while the game is running and immediately see the results in the running game. This is super great for rapid tweaking. — Markus Persson

We reinvent ourselves to solve a client's problem. It's more than just tweaking. It's rethinking what your audience wants and needs. Isn't that what great actors constantly do? — Merrie Spaeth

I'm always tweaking, always trying to make it better, constantly moving the levers and dials. — Steve Ells

I like to work in the real world, so I do a lot of searching or just simple looking. But I'm not above tweaking reality and making something up. I don't think there are any rules in art. It's not so much what you see as it is the significance you, the artist, see in it. — Keith Carter

A lot of science doesn't require big "ns" but if you're trying to understand something about human health and you're looking at interventions that are not going to be either killing you or making you live forever - they're going to have some tweaking on the outcome - you need big numbers or you don't have enough power. — Francis Collins

I've always been serious that way, trying to evolve to a more conscious state. Funny thing about that,though. You tweak yourself,looking for more love, less lust, more compassion, less jealousy. You keep tweaking, keep adjusting those knobs until you can no longer find the original settings. In some sense,the original settings are exactly what I'm looking for-a return to the easygoing guy i was before my world got complicated, the nice guy who took things as they came and laughed so hard the blues would blow away in the summer wind. — Bill Withers

What makes Disney movies and Pixar movies always so good, hey take time and they're constantly honing, and tweaking, and rejiggering things, and taking influences from every cog, including myself, that can help. Any place where there can be inspiration. They make every moment very layered and very rich. — Sarah Silverman

The government regulates them, or chooses not to, approves or blocks their mergers and acquisitions, and sets their tax policies (often turning a blind eye to the billions parked in offshore tax havens). This is why tech companies, like the rest of corporate America, inundate Washington with lobbyists and quietly pour hundreds of millions of dollars in contributions into the political system. Now they're gaining the wherewithal to fine-tune our political behavior - and with it the shape of American government - just by tweaking their algorithms. — Cathy O'Neil

It's not easy, either psychologically or practically, to keep tweaking the truth to make it all fit together. — Haruki Murakami

The tweaking of us by God in the quiet is the saving of us in public. — Lysa TerKeurst

My toughest criticism usually comes from myself. As my editor can attest to, I'm never done tweaking a book until the production department has to rip it from my hands! — Kresley Cole

With a little more tweaking, we could make orange juice in the orange without any packaging or processing. — Homaro Cantu

There are certain bad habits we've groomed our whole life
from personality flaws to fashion faux pas. And it has been the role of parents and friends, outside of some minor tweaking, to reinforce the belief that we're okay just as we are. But it's not enough to just be yourself. You have to be your best self. And that's a tall order if you haven't found your best self yet. — Neil Strauss

Tweaking your body , it's all about trying to make your physical self fit with who you are inside — Becky Chambers

But it was pointless, it was stupid; he thought about thoughtless things. If I were a seabird ... but how could you be a seabird? If you were a seabird your brain would be tiny and stupid and you would love half-rotted fish guts and tweaking the eyes out of little grazing animals; you would know no poetry and you could never appreciate flying as fully as the human on the ground yearning to be you.
If you wanted to be a seabird you deserved to be one. — Iain M. Banks

There are a few things in life that occur, that you don't ask for, that are just dealt to you.
These things can define you or you can define yourself through them.
I elect to define myself through overcoming what has been dealt to me in my life.
It took thirty-one years and two generations of tweaking to get my first perfect ending.
Now I am going to work on my next one. — JohnA Passaro

I think Republicans will not win again in my lifetime ... unless they become a new GOP, a new Republican Party. And it has to be a transformation. Not a little tweaking at the edges. — Rand Paul

People are satisfied with making minor upgrades and tweaking things here and there - as long as that's the landscape, it will keep on happening. I don't see a problem necessarily, but at the same time it is nice to see new things come. — Hideo Kojima

Jabba resembled a giant tadpole, like the cinematic creature for whom he was nicknamed, the man was a hairless spheroid. As resident guardian angel of all NSA computer systems, Jabba marched from department to department, tweaking, soldering, and reaffirming his credo that prevention was the best medicine. No NSA computer had ever been infected under Jabba's reign; he intended to keep it that way. — Dan Brown

And that's how I start myself. I usually go back a couple of pages, maybe to the beginning of the chapter, and I start reading. And as I'm reading, I'm tweaking - putting in a different word, changing the syntax, putting that clause over there, you know that sort of thing. — Jean M. Auel

I would fix other people's lines if they asked me on occasion. The hard part of writing is the architecture of it, getting the story and structuring it. Not the tweaking of lines. — William Devane

Change is not overcoming inertia as much as it is redirecting, guiding, tweaking what already is and what has already happened. We must believe that we can make choices and that those choices can alter the future. — Max McKeown

Make no mistake, the organizations website counsels. You will be writing a lot of crap. And thats a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. I am not the first person to point out that writing a lot of crap doesnt sound like a particularly fruitful way to spend an entire month, even if it is November. — Laura Miller

I can't live with art: I'd spend too much time tweaking it. — Thelma Golden