Top 54 Quotes About Specificity
#1. EAMES: Try this... "MY FATHER ACCEPTS THAT I WANT TO CREATE FOR MYSELF, NOT FOLLOW IN HIS FOOTSTEPS."
COBB: That might work.
ARTHUR: Might? We'll have to do better than that.
EAMES: Thanks for the contribution, Arthur.
ARTHUR: Forgive me for wanting a little specificity, Eames.
Christopher J. Nolan
#2. I think people can be trusted to know what makes them unhappy. Maybe we don't always know what we want exactly, but we can usually say what we don't with a fair amount of specificity.
Ann Aguirre
#3. I mean, on virtually every major issue before this country that is the natural purview of the federal government, it's important to have some specificity about what you're going to do if you want to be the president. And so I agree that, up until this point, it hasn't been a huge factor.
Marco Rubio
#4. If the results of the present study on the chemical nature of the transforming principle are confirmed, then nucleic acids must be regarded as possessing biological specificity the chemical basis of which is as yet undetermined.
Oswald Theodore Avery
#5. I think we are living a life without specificity, and then our lives become abstractions.
Terry Tempest Williams
#6. Poetry lies at the centre of the literary experience because it is the form that most clearly asserts the specificity of literature.
Jonathan Culler
#7. Jewish, black, Filipino, whatever the specificity is, it's specificity that makes a good story. And I think people are tired of seeing the same old shtick on network television. It's just a group of white people hanging out talking about their jobs. Who cares? We've seen that.
Rachel Bloom
#8. Everything that David Chase does has a tremendous amount of specificity. He is very detail oriented.
John Magaro
#9. This is who you are, I thought, and my eyes were wet with love for myself and my lovers and for the world. How wonderful and strange it is to be alive! How uneven we are, and how lucky, in our delirious specificity and holy broken forms.
Justin Taylor
#10. The advantage of writing from experience is that it often provides you with details that you would never think of yourself, no matter how rich your imagination. And specificity in description is something every writer should strive for.
Christopher Paolini
#11. I love a sense of humor, I love intelligence, I love specificity, I love surprises. I'm inspired to get out of bed in the morning and fill my day with good things.
Michael Stuhlbarg
#12. Surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#13. The best proof of the specificity of the book is that it is at once a reality of the virtual and a virtuality of the real.
Gaston Bachelard
#14. I think fiction isn't so good at being for or against things in general - the rhetorical argument a short story can make is only actualized by the accretion of particular details, and the specificity of these details renders whatever conclusions the story reaches invalid for wider application.
George Saunders
#16. What we need is a critique of visual culture that is alert to the power of images for good and evil and that is capable of discriminating the variety and historical specificity of their uses.
William J. Mitchell
#17. I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.
William Gibson
#18. To his ear, of course, she suffered some from that malady of her generation- an almost laconic indifference toward speaking concisely- a circling and avoidance of linguistic specificity that bordered on a verbal form of shoulder-shrugging.
Steve Amick
#20. Specificity is what makes good storytelling, and good storytelling is what makes money, and making money is then what encourages new producers to invest in different stories about Asians.
Constance Wu
#21. Most uses of bioassay involving smooth muscle demand high sensitivity and specificity.
John Vane
#22. There's a specificity of language that's required in Shakespeare that most drama students in England deal with - a specificity of language that is somehow not as clear in a lot of American schools.
James Avery
#23. The transaction cost approach maintains that some projects are easy to finance by debt and ought to be financed by debt. These are projects for which physical-asset specificity is low to moderate.
Oliver E. Williamson
#24. Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.
Walter Mosley
#25. Specificity of time and place drop away and one starts to think about the picture, as much as what it is of.
Uta Barth
#26. The iPod has taken away the whole platinum record sales prospect. Sincerity and specificity are going to be the hot commodities in music. Everybody can have anything that they want, so now it gets into what specifically you have to give.
Eric Lewis
#27. I'm always looking for a reason to say no when I'm approached about a big studio tentpole because your fear is will you be consumed into the anonymous machine, and it will suck out any specificity and point of view that you might hope to express.
Matt Reeves
#28. I've never had a "hankering" to direct. I can perform, but I can't write on that level. I tend to go off on tangents. Directing also requires a kind of specificity and I don't have it.
Robin Williams
#29. As has repeatedly been stated, the underlying hypothesis, which in a number of cases has been supported by direct experimental evidence, is that each gene controls the production, function, and specificity of a particular enzyme.
Edward Lawrie Tatum
#30. This relative freedom of a hero does not violate the strict specificity of the construction, just as the specificity of a mathematical formula is not violated by the presence of irrational or transfinite quantities.
Mikhail Bakhtin
#31. France has a specificity - the market players who provide Internet access are the telecom operators, and all of the players are French. They had a habit of, let's say, getting along with each other, and the prices traditionally were very high.
Xavier Niel
#32. The lesson Arendt drew was that a beautiful soul is not enough, for "it was precisely the soul for which life showed no consideration." To live fully and securely, every human being needs what Arendt calls "specificity," the social and political status that comes with full membership in a community.
Adam Kirsch
#33. At MTV, it's very nice sometimes to be able to be very specific. Specificity really makes a news story interesting because you can color it in that personality.
Tabitha Soren
#34. That's partly the success of my work-the ability to have a young black girl walk into the Brooklyn Museum and see paintings she recognizes not because of their art or historical influence but because of their inflection, in terms of colors, their specificity and presence.
Kehinde Wiley
#35. Mostly what you lose with time, in memory, is the specificity of things, their exact sequence. It all runs together, becomes a watery soup. Portmanteau days, imploded years. Like a bad actor, memory always goes for effect, abjuring motivation, consistency, good sense.
James Sallis
#36. I think something that I can't name about our media has made us move away from that kind of specificity and that kind of curiosity.
George Saunders
#37. All that is alive tends toward color, individuality, specificity, effectiveness and opacity. All that is done with life inclines toward knowledge, abstraction, generality transfiguration and transparency.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#38. I don't want to think that anything is off limits for me to write about, but I also don't want to intrude on anybody's life, which is why there's very little specificity or names in the songs I write.
J. D. Souther
#39. I think references, where they fit organically, are great. It's great to do a show that's real and relatable, and so much of what is real, is using real things and instances that are specific. Specificity is the best tool you can have, as a writer.
Mindy Kaling
#40. Thought is power, as is desire, but neither is enough unless it is backed by faith, specificity, and the desire to see to it that it becomes.
Stephen Richards
#41. Honesty was a thing that could never be a thing. In a blaze of hubris and misplaced enthusiasm, we kowtowed to it, thinking it would make us better people, but conveniently forgetting that an abstraction was incompatible with the specificity of a human's needs and wants.
Erin Bomboy
#42. One bit in or out of focus makes the difference between our bodies being ourselves and our being part of a group. I want to melt the idea of specificity and blend individuality into the crowd.
Ross Bleckner
#43. I think that talking about the personal specificity, personal details, is how you get the big, big audiences - by talking about your relationships or your personal tragedies. If you reach out with that energy, you'll touch people.
Mike Mills
#44. The Middleman: "So what's it going to be? Keep the secret or death?"
Wendy Watson: "What do you think?"
The Middleman: "Ma'am specificity is the soul of all good communication.
Javier Grillo-Marxuach
#45. The truth, or success, of any writer's story lies partly in its specificity and its emotional honesty.
Gail Caldwell
#46. What a mystery we are to ourselves, even as we go on, learning more, sorting it out a little. The further on we go, the more meaning there is, but the less articulable. You live your life, and the older you get - the more specificity you harvest - the more precious becomes every ounce and spasm.
Gregory Maguire
#47. My advice would be to write what is most personal and specific to your experience or your life. And your voice will emerge and because of its specificity, it will be universal.
David Schwimmer
#48. Yet Gotama's Dhamma is more than just a series of axioms. It is to be lived rather than simply adopted and believed in. It entails that one embrace this world in all its contingency and specificity, with all its ambiguity and flaws.
Stephen Batchelor
#49. Perhaps where text slides toward ambiguity, film inclines to specificity. A novel contains as many versions of itself as it has readers, whereas a film's final cut vaporizes every other way it might have been made.
David Mitchell
#50. What I'm hoping to do though is to ground my extrapolations in specificity, and to make sure that the story I tell is deliberately and honestly told.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#51. Some after-the-fact storytelling is inevitable, and, in fact, very good and useful. But then we want always to be able to enrich the stories, or maybe change the stories with a fresh infusion of specificity.
Nicholson Baker
#52. I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
#53. It is unlikely that you'll have anything emerge from MEF (Major Economies Forum) by way of detailed programmatic specificity.
Kevin Rudd
#54. This idea that there is generality in the specific is of far-reaching importance.
Douglas R. Hofstadter
