Top 100 The Detail Quotes
#1. When I look at my career, the bulk of it has been television, and I love working in television. But there's a speed at which you do it. You're doing seven to ten pages a day on a series, and it's hard to feel like you're doing the detail-oriented work that I like to do.
Sarah Paulson
#2. He was a secret agent, and still alive thanks to his exact attention to the detail of his profession.
Ian Fleming
#3. I have a lot of trouble understanding all the detail of finance and administration - but if you combine intellectual and professional capacity with a social conscience, you can change things: countries, structures, economic models, colonial states.
Evo Morales
#4. The social side of Washington was to be taken for granted as three-fourths of existence. Politics and reform became the detail, and waltzing the profession
Henry Adams
#5. The devil was always in the detail. And here the detail was certainly devilish.
Sara Sheridan
#7. As PM, you have got to do everything from chairing the Cabinet to ceremonial things. You have also got to do the nitty gritty. I do get stuck into the detail.
David Cameron
#8. Only the poet can look beyond the detail and see the whole picture.
Helen Hayes
#9. The pathetic almost always consists in the detail of little events.
Edward Gibbon
#10. I love the detail about the workings of the human heart and mind that only fiction can provide - film can't get in close enough.
Nick Hornby
#11. A man must be able to cut a knot, for everything cannot be untied; he must know how to disengage what is essential from the detail in which it is enwrapped, for everything cannot be equally considered; in a word, he must be able to simplify his duties, his business and his life.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#12. But the detail of the poem shows power akin to genius, and reveals to us that much neglected law of literary history
that potential genius can never become actual unless it finds or makes the Form which it requires.
C.S. Lewis
#13. I like the detail work of telling a story in small pieces, as is done in movie-making, and also the long leap of faith needed to see a theatre performance through each night. Both require focus and self-discipline.
Viggo Mortensen
#14. Without going into too much detail, the end of my major action scene, after the climax of the scene, there was one little change that I suggested regarding the way things should turn out. It was in the detail of the tears of blood.
Chiaki Kuriyama
#15. No one has ever used historical examples, near or remote, with the detail, precision, and directness to be found in every page of Shaw.
Jacques Barzun
#16. I have always loved beautiful leather objects, especially the detail that goes into designing them both inside and out.
Colleen Atwood
#17. All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas!
T.E. Lawrence
#19. For a moment I was filled with the sensation of white snow against black water. The way the whiteness erases all the detail around a lake or a river in the forest so that the difference between land and water is absolute, and the water lies there as a deeply alien entity, a black hole in the world.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#20. The hesitancy is in the detail, not the principal. There has been no resistance to the principal of women playing in the Open if they are qualified for it. We are not dragging our feet. It's just that we never had cause to think about it before.
Peter Dawson
#21. Look, the thing that's going to make Disneyland unique and different,' he insisted, 'is the detail. If we loose the detail, we loose it all.
Neal Gabler
#22. Look at the Coen brothers. All their minor characters are as interesting as their protagonists. If the smaller characters are well-written, the whole world of the film becomes enriched. It's not the size of the thing, but the detail.
Brendan Gleeson
#23. He closed by telling us the real battle is won in the mind. It's won by guys who understand their areas of weakness, who sit and think about it, plotting and planning to improve. Attending to the detail. Work on their weaknesses and overcome them. Because they can.
Marcus Luttrell
#24. Frank Lloyd Wright made houses right up until the end. I think that's important because it gives you a direct connection to all the basic aspects of architecture - the spatial energy of the place, the construction, the materials, the site, the detail.
Steven Holl
#25. The concrete is better than the abstract. The detail is better than the commonplace. The sensual [through the senses] is better than the intellectual. The visual is better than the mental.
Ellen Hunnicutt
#26. I think it's possible to a certain extent to make those comparisons. The problem is the detail with which the comparison can be made. Of course, the first place to make such a comparison would be to ask for a testimony from different people and have people report on what they experience.
Antonio Damasio
#27. But this was one way of knowing people, she thought: to know the outline, not the detail, to sit in one's garden and look at the slopes of a hill running purple down into the distant heather.
Virginia Woolf
#28. There was a terminal narrative. It was a story until it stopped being a story and until then they kept wanting to know. Give up... Surrender your need for the detail; there is only one way this is going to end.
Emily Perkins
#29. The important things. Where should I find them? In the detail, like God? In the risk, like the Devil?
Jeanette Winterson
#30. It was a good hanging," said Syme reminiscently. "I think it spoils it when they tie their feet together. I like to see them kicking. And above all, at the end, the tongue sticking right out, and blue a quite bright blue. That's the detail that appeals to me.
George Orwell
#31. I never desire to know anything of the detail of political measures, lest even those which I think best should lose anything of their intrinsic value to me, by seeing what low, paltry, personal motives and base machinery and dirty hands have helped to bring them about.
Fanny Kemble
#32. I have just started Vera Brittian's Testament of Youth - have yet to see the film.
It's a great inspiration in many ways, but the detail written without sentiment and first hand, gives the most moving account of the WW1 from every perspective.
Jan Hunter
#33. Although the detail of our sexual energies and their objects and objectives vastly vary, the existence of our sexuality itself is an undeniable truth.
Lynn Margulis
#34. The detail is as important as the essential is. When it is inadequate, it destroys the whole outfit.
Christian Dior
#35. People versed in politics need not be told that the devil is in the detail, and tough solutions implying the use of force cannot produce a lasting long-term settlement.
Sergei Lavrov
#36. Ryder - the oldest, Avery continued. He's standing as job boss on this project. Owen's the detail guy, runs the numbers, makes the calls, takes the meetings. Or most of them. Beckett's an architect.
Nora Roberts
#37. Everything in journalism is about the detail that makes the whole, the attempts to reproduce speech patterns while not actually quoting the whole thing the person said.
Neil Gaiman
#38. If I was a guy I wouldn't be bossy, I would be strong. If I was a guy I wouldn't be a micro-manager, I would be across the detail.
Peta Credlin
#39. However minutely labored the picture may be in the detail, the whole will have a false and even an unfinished appearance, at whatever distance, or in whatever light it can be shown.
Joshua Reynolds
#40. The smaller the detail the greater the value.
Doug Johnson
#41. Tilly was downcast; as with all perfectionists, it was the detail others might not notice that destroyed for her the pleasure of achievement.
Elspeth Huxley
#42. The book [Night manager] is amazing. It is amazing to act in any book adaptation, because a book gives you so many secrets and details that don't necessarily get shot in an adaptation. They give you a cushion underneath everything. The detail in the character, the detail in the tone.
Tom Hiddleston
#43. I decided to take my foot off the pedal with all the detail. I'm sure after 'Animalia' and 'The Eleventh Hour,' readers thought that's what to expect from Graeme Base. With 'The Sign of the Seahorse,' I took a step away from the puzzle-book genre - that was more of an adventure story.
Graeme Base
#44. The new trick is to stay in the present ... Get lost in the detail of it ... Enjoy it!
Sally Green
#45. I think the further away you get from completing a book, the more responses you see to it from readers, the more your own tastes and opinions shift and the more you start to see things you could have written differently in the detail, or done differently on the broader scale of plot and character.
Joe Abercrombie
#46. When you get onstage, you can see everyone in the audience's face, down to the detail. You can see who may or may not be yawning.
Jim Rash
#47. The intimacy of the detail - why The Silence of the Lambs is quite possibly the Thriller Writer's bible.
Thomas Harris
#48. My general plan is good, though in the detail there may be faults.
Adam Weishaupt
#49. She described people, scenes, and objects she had never seen with the detail and precision of a Flemish master. Her words evoked textures and echoes, the color of voices, the rhythm of footsteps.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#50. While awareness of global governance problems is arguably rising, even most of the educated public is rather unaware of the detail of how global policies are actually carried out. Marginal
Thomas Hale
#51. Yeah, I have the detail-obsessed, controlling personality of a novelist, but I somehow ended up writing plays.
Annie Baker
#52. In moviemaking, you learn to pay attention to detail, because so much is in the detail. And when you're shooting, you try to be very alert to what's going on, even if you're tired.
Frederick Wiseman
#53. I got a few things, because I think the props are so beautiful as much as anything else. The detail of the work is something that one has no idea of.
David Heyman
#55. The skies and land are so enormous, and the detail so precise and exquisite that wherever you are you are isolated in a glowing world between the macro and the micro.
Ansel Adams
#56. What fascinates people isn't policy- who cares about policy? What fascinates people is always people- the detail of another person's life.
Robert Harris
#57. The detail adds an element of unexpected something. All fiction is false; what makes it convincing is that it runs alongside the truth. The real world has lots of incidental details, so a painting also has to have that element of imperfection and irregularity, those incidental details.
Shaun Tan
#58. Polly Findlay showed real insight and imagination in her production of my translation of Seneca's Thyestes at the Arcola. I enjoyed her use of the space and the detail of her work with the actors, and I'm looking forward to seeing what she does with Light Shining.
Caryl Churchill
#59. I can't imagine how American readers will react to a novel, but if the story is appealing it doesn't matter much if you don't catch all the detail. I'm not too familiar with the geography of nineteenth century London, for instance, but I still enjoy reading Dickens.
Haruki Murakami
#60. Clutter is not an attribute of information, clutter is a failure of design ... fix the design rather than stripping all the detail out of the map.
Edward Tufte
#61. I also think when it comes to delivering on Brexit, we need someone with a passion but also the mastery of the detail.
Dominic Raab
#62. I came out of the nine-hour surgery and I had tubes in every direction, and those nurses at the Mayo Clinic, I could cry for four days at the kindness of those nurses. The care, the detail of the care, the attention that just never wavered, never complained. The love.
Eve Ensler
#63. If you stand too close to a painting - all you see are patches of color, if you stand too far back, you can't see any of the detail.
Mandy Patinkin
#64. The play is independent of the pages on which it is printed, and 'pure geometries' are independent of lecture rooms, or of any other detail of the physical world.
G.H. Hardy
#65. Good design is thorough, down to the last detail.
Dieter Rams
#66. Such being the nature of mental life, the business of psychology is primarily to describe in detail the various forms which attention or conation assumes upon the different levels of that life.
Samuel Alexander
#67. I'm proud of Lord of the Rings. I think it's a once in a lifetime role, and a once in a lifetime film. It was made with so much care and passion and meticulous detail and everybody was so behind it.
Sean Bean
#68. Any one detail, followed through to its source, will usually reveal the general state of readiness of the whole organization.
Hyman Rickover
#69. Culture is a way of coping with the world by defining it in detail.
Malcolm Bradbury
#70. I sketch in a way that people can nearly do the dresses without me coming in for a fitting. Every single detail, every proportion, every cut
everything.
Karl Lagerfeld
#71. The artist should fear to become the slave of detail. He should strive to express his thought and not the surface of it. What avails a storm cloud accurate in form and color if the storm is not therein?
Albert Pinkham Ryder
#72. Somehow whether or not the war is winnable is beyond our scope, an irrelevant detail. We don't do it to win anymore; we do it because it's what we know how to do. Get ready to go. Get ready to come back. And the moments in between we mark on the calendar. It's our battle rhythm.
Angela Ricketts
#73. Intricately plotted, beautifully paced, The Music of the Spheres is an elegant historical novel rich in detail, at times Dickensian in its description of London. Elizabeth Redfern has made an exciting debut.
Martha Grimes
#74. The most important quality of art and its aim is illusion; emotion, which is often obtained by certain sacrifices of poetic detail, is something else entirely and of an inferior order.
Gustave Flaubert
#75. The more personal, revealing and sniveling, the more interesting...I wanna feel like I'm snooping, peeking thru the keyhole into somebody's, anybody's, private hell...no detail is too petty if it's honest...
Aline Kominsky-Crumb
#76. Expression is not a matter of passion mirrored on the human face or revealed by a violent gesture. When I paint a picture, its every detail is expressive.
Henri Matisse
#77. God does not look at our suffering from afar. It is an intimate event to him. He is the author of every detail, speaking the suffering as it occurs.
Ben Palpant
#78. We can all see God in exceptional things, but it requires the culture of spiritual discipline to see God in every detail.
Oswald Chambers
#79. For theater, the fashion had to have a certain grandeur that would read on the stage while also flattering the actress. The same thing applies when doing a wedding dress, but the treatments can be more delicate and there can be much more detail.
Austin Scarlett
#80. I always plan the whole story in some detail, long before I start writing the actual thing. But even doing that, I find that there is plenty of room for spontaneity. Often the characters will lead the story off in a direction I hadn't originally intended!
Raymond Buckland
#81. Fastidious attention to detail makes the difference between an OK service and first class service.
Ben Elliot
#82. I have always been obsessed with America, the geography, the history, and, of course, the music. I've been lucky enough to have travelled through the country a lot, and, in a kind of anorak way, I've noted which states I've visited and which ones I've been to most often and all that sort of detail.
Tim Rice
#83. Being a quarterback, the way I believe is there's always so much room to improve. Any little detail. I always cut up the film and try to watch what I can improve on, whatever little detail it is.
Russell Wilson
#84. The thing about research is that there's no end. You constantly have this fear that an expert who knows more than you will call you out on some detail in your book.
Gene Luen Yang
#85. Here is the worst possible way for you to try to figure out if your idea solves somebody's problem: Ask them. The vast majority of entrepreneurs seem to think that explaining their concept in detail to a few people and then asking whether it's a good idea constitutes validation. It does not.
Laura Klein
#86. Use original detail in your writing. Life is so rich, if you can write down the real details of the way things were and are, you hardly need anything else.
Natalie Goldberg
#87. When you introduce things that most readers have never seen before into a piece of fiction, you have to describe them with as much precision and in as much detail as possible. What you can eliminate from fiction is the description of things that most readers have seen.
Haruki Murakami
#88. When I was born, my parents - my mother especially - couldn't come to terms with that fact that they had another baby girl. I know these stories in detail because every time a guest visited, or there was a gathering, they repeated this story in front of me that how I was the unwanted child.
Kangana Ranaut
#89. All we're trying to do is word the world. Detail is one way we do that. We enumerate, notate, name the things seen.
Eamon Grennan
#90. Molecular genetics, our latest wonder, has taught us to spell out the connectivity of the tree of life in such palpable detail that we may say in plain words, "This riddle of life has been solved."
Max Delbruck
#91. I love detail, like drawing what's on top of someone's coffee table. Maybe there's a little bowl of butterscotch candies on it, next to the four TV remotes.
Roz Chast
#92. Larry David's armor is his dissatisfaction with the world down to the smallest detail, and up to the whole ghastly arrangement. He won't win, but he'll enjoy losing.
Tom Shales
#93. While primarily a photographer, I do not see or think photographically; hence the story of Indian life will not be told in microscopic detail, but rather will be presented as a broad and luminous picture.
Edward S. Curtis
#94. We demand that people should be true to the pictures we have of them, no matter how repulsive those pictures may be: we prefer the true portrait in all its homogeneity, to one with a detail added which refuses to fit in.
Pamela Hansford Johnson
#95. Only old Benjamin professed to remember every detail of his long life and to know that things never had been, nor ever could be much better or much worse--hunger, hardship, and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life.
George Orwell
#96. If the article mentions some celebrity-perhaps a recently dead politician-the author will want to mention some pointless detail from her last meeting with that person or the emotions she experienced when learning of the subject's death.
David Brooks
#97. There's one detail I've always remembered: He told me how long it takes the light from the stars to reach through space to us.
How most of the points of light we see actually no longer exist. We're just seeing the remnants of what was
ghosts of what use to be.
Carrie Ryan
#98. I wrote three novels in six months, with a clarity of focus and attention to detail that I had never before experienced. This type of sublime creative energy is characteristic of the elevated and productive mood state known as hypomania.
Ayelet Waldman
#99. Don't unpack your heart. One detail tells the truth.
Ian McEwan
#100. In some instances, the accuracy of past-life memories can be objectively verified, sometimes with remarkable detail.
Stanislav Grof
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