Erik Larson Quotes

Turned the wrong way around, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied in "History", harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.

We never really know what's around the corner when we're filming - what turn a story will take, what a character will do or say to surprise us, how the events in the world will impact our story.

Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn't.

'Amores Perros' is three stories that interconnect in one moment, which is the car accident.

Real life is much stranger than fiction, man.

The one thing we can all be sure about in politics is you are as well to expect the unexpected.

I don't want to set the world up for surprises.

The whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it.

Some things are so unexpected that no one is prepared for them.

Agatha Christie never wrote books that just started with a dead body, and a 'Let's find out who the murderer is', which is kind of mysterious but not that mysterious. She always started with, 'How can this thing be happening; isn't it strange?'

Funny things happen to you in movies for silly reasons.

Nigel might have an earlier date, but I think it's unprecedented from my memory. So it is a reminder to everybody that the public can move very rapidly on some issues and therefore what looks settled may not be.

While most of the things you've worried about have never happened, it's a different story with the things you haven't worried about. They are the ones that happen.

History does not repeat itself. Nor does it unfold in cycles. The real future is contingent, rich beyond imagining, a perennial gobsmack, tragic and glorious in equal measure; the pundits' future, spun of 'conventional wisdom,' is only a sucker punch to that common-sense fact.

When we were filming 'Twilight,' we didn't expect anything. We were just filming a movie that we wanted the fans to enjoy. And then it kinda just blew into this whole other world.

There's always going to be the circumstances you can't plan for. There's always the unexpected relevance and the serendipity.

If you haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been much of a day.

History is totally unpredictable.

Very low probability events occur very rarely, but sometimes they do happen.

History proceeds in zig zags through crooked paths.

No man can tell what the future may bring forth

My books are about ordinary people caught up in extraordinary situations.

It's weird writing for a documentary because I have all these ideas for what I want to happen, but what actually happens is obviously completely different.

We live lives that aren't broken into neat three-act structures. On any given day anything can happen, from the hilarious to tragic. So why can't my movies be like that?

I think, like all big things, you don't know they're going to be a big thing when you start. You just kind of, like, play because it's fun, and it's interesting, and then it turns out to be way more important than you expected.