Karl Pilkington Quotes

I am always living in the now, so I like what fate brings to you. That's always fun for me. To have a process and someone be like, 'How about this?' And you just grab onto that and see where it takes you.

So much of making movies is about discovery on the day, what you're figuring out. If you know everything going in, then it's not worth doing - it's already done.

An actor can never plan. You never know what can work in your favour or not and then maybe the whole dynamics can change.

I often don't know what I'll be working on next year or a year from now. There is often a chance meeting, or something that I worked on 10 years ago suddenly becomes important again.

I tend to go with the flow and that flow can end up in great places or not so great places.

We are comfortable with formulas, but the best happens when the formula doesn't work.

We can no longer stand at the end of something we visualized in detail and plan backwards from that future. Instead we must stand at the beginning, clear in our mind, with a willingness to be involved in discovery... it asks that we participate rather than plan.

I've worked with collage a lot. And there's this chance thing that happens - you don't always control things. Why did you find this today and not this? But you've got this thing, and you make it work. It's the way life is, I suppose. Whatever happens, you deal with it.

So what starts is ad hoc and you never know where it's going to lead, so it's important to keep an open mind about those things.

All great work is preparing yourself for the accident to happen.

The biggest threat to a better life is the desire to keep the future under control - to make the world predictable by reining in creativity and enterprise. Progress as a neat blueprint, with no deviations and no surprise, may work in children's cartoons or utopian novels. But it's just a fantasy.

When I do a take, I very often try things that I haven't planned to try to see if I can pull it off.

In my work, I have never had any use for anything that I have known in advance.

We have the script, we have the actors, and we're trying to figure out what this is, and you don't know what it is. You have to be open to what it's going to become rather than have this thing that you're trying to get to, which is boring.

We always have a take that's 'one for fun', so once you've got what you need, you can do what you like. Something does occasionally pop out of that tree. I'm always open to ideas.

My methodology is not knowing what I'm doing and making that work for me.

I always leave room for serendipity and chance.

My life is spontaneous and things just kind of happen.

The whole thing about the way I approach work is to be surprised by an opportunity when it comes up. So I have no idea what I will be doing next, and I kind of like that.

Producing a series is like being Lewis and Clark: You know where you're going, you just don't know how you're going to get there. When people say, 'You should create a bible for your show,' I say, 'You don't want a bible. It'll prevent you from making discoveries along the way.' And that's what happened on 'The X-Files.'

I've never had a clear road map. When things come along, I benefit.

Art is lunging forward without certainty about where you are going or how to get there, being open to and dependent on what luck, the paint, the typo, the dissonance, give you. Without art you're stuck with yourself as you are and life as you think life is.

Certain things you have to stumble on to. They can't be preprogrammed.

You could never plan your life in a million years.

Never in my life have I thought, 'What's next?' It's just like 'Finding Dory.' Things just happen.