What If Scenarios Quotes

Life was what happened when all the what-ifs didn't.

I also hate those holidays that fall on a Monday where you don't get mail, those fake holidays like Columbus Day. What did Christopher Columbus do, discover America? If he hadn't, somebody else would have and we'd still be here. Big deal.

To be born means being compelled to choose an era, a place, a life. To exist here, now, means to lost the possibility of being countless other potential selves.. Yet once being born there is no turning back. And I think that's exactly why the fantasy worlds of cartoon movies so strongly represent our hopes and yearnings. They illustrate a world of lost possibilities for us.

Fantasy is a genre that allows me to create anything I want. That, in turn, allows me to explore any sort of idea I'm curious about. I love it because Fantasy is a genre that asks, "What if...?" That's my favorite question.

[on River Phoenix] I would love to see what kind of choices he would be making now if he was still around, some of the characters that he would have played. I mean, to me he was like a rock star, you know, he had it all: he had the looks, he had a great name, he had an attitude, an energy, an excitement about him. He was instinctively like a, he was a rebel, you know? He was kind of Bob Dylan to me, at times, and he had a lot to say. And I've never seen too many interviews by him, but the ones that I saw were pretty electric, pretty... he was switched on, definitely.

Everything else happened - why not the things that could have?

History does not disclose to us its alternatives.

Science fiction is the great opportunity to speculate on what could happen. It does give me, as a futurist, scenarios.

But lost chances are as much a part of life as chances taken, and a story cannot dwell on what might have been.

Sometimes I lie awake at night, and wonder if my life would be different if I had to do it over... Then a voice comes to me out of the dark that says, "boy, there's an original thought!

I can't think of anything that I turned down that became big and successful.

The chance you passed up or missed could have had any number of different outcomes, and it's easy to fantasize about how much better every one of those outcomes would have been.

When you look at life retrospectively you rarely regret anything that you did, but you might regret things that you didn't do.

When I won the competition, I had just been offered a job as a designer in Düsseldorf, so that's probably what I'd be doing now. It can be fascinating to consider how your life might have turned out, like in the movie Sliding Doors, but I'm too busy to look back.

Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.... Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.... Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don't tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies.

I always wonder, aside from even my name, what if my parents never split up? What if my mother never died? It swirls in my head all the time.

When the movie 'Sliding Doors' came out, it almost sent me into existential crisis because I think about that all the time. Like, 'Wait. If I left my house five minutes later, maybe this would have happened and I'd be on this different track of my life. How would that affect me?'

I don't know how to sit outside myself and test against a hypothetical self who stayed home.

" ... What if?" Through the alchemy of those two words, something new comes into the world.

What fascinates me are the turning points where history could have been different.

I'm nostalgic and I do think about a "what if."

I turned down the opportunity to be in some films that went on to be blockbusters.

I don't write historical novels but novels that wonder, 'And what if it happened in this way and not in this other one?'

In Sliding Doors, the whole idea is that every choice you make, and every single thing that happens to you changes the trajectory of your life, and once you are put on that trajectory, there is no way back. But Groundhog Day - which, I tell him, also happens to be a much better movie - says the opposite. It says if you mess up or make the wrong choice, you just have to keep at it until you do it right.

Ah, in this world, where every guiding thread Ends suddenly in the one sure centre, death, The visionary hand of Might-have-been Alone can fill Desire's cup to the brim!