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.”

“I'm not really a Jew; just Jew-ish, not the whole hog.”

“Errors of taste are very often the outward sign of a deep fault of sensibility.”

“Science is a self-sufficient activity.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“A lot of high-level scientists are in fact people of almost universal interest.”

“What I should have been, you see, is a neurologist.”