Sarah Cooper Quotes

If you do not expect the unexpected you will not find it, for it is not to be reached by search or trail.

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.

I'm not a creature of habit. I like to find things from unexpected sources.

I always leave room for serendipity and chance.

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.

Being open to the unexpected allows me to bring so much to my craft.

The important thing is not to know where you are going, to be open to accidents. That's what keeps it fun.

I'm always open to new stuff. I don't sit and try to figure out what to do, I just wait for an idea to come.

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.

When you work with an actor and then you discover new things that are better, I think you gotta be free to be able to go with the new things that you're finding. I think that's very important. I have a strong idea when I go to shoot a movie but I also love to discover things when I'm on set as well.

If you don't have a plan, you can end up doing some interesting things.

One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.

A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.

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

Don't plan too hard, because something much better might be out there.

Nothing I ever did I expected to do. It just kind of happened.

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.

The essence of play is that the sequence of actions is fluid and scattered.

Mistakes are the portals of discovery.

Often times, I'm surprised by what I'm writing or what I'm playing, and then that inspires me to keep going with it, so it ends up being a very adventurous process.

I try not to do anything by formula.

Anything goes. You always find interesting things that way.

I always try to keep that feeling of being on the edge. I'm afraid of knowing too well and seeming mechanical.

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 haven't really met anyone else who has influenced me, but you never know, it could happen next year or next month. I just like to go with the spur of the moment.