Something that you should take particular notice of is the fact that the best scripts have very few explanatory passages. Adding explanation to the descriptive passages of a screenplay is the most dangerous trap you can fall into. It’s easy to explain the psychological state of a character at a particular moment, but it’s very difficult to describe it through the delicate nuances of action and dialogue. Yet it is not impossible. A great deal about this can be learned from the study of the great plays, and I believe the ‘hard-boiled’ detective novels can also be very instructive.
Throughout the human experience people have read history because they felt that it was a pleasure and that it was in some way instructive. The profession of professor of history has taken it in a very different direction.
Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring, a south wind, not an east wind.
I spent most of my 20s dating older men, and I really wish I had spent that time dating men my own age who were going through the same experiences I was. I totally understand the appeal of a mature, dashing older man over fellow twenty-somethings who are still figuring things out. And, true, a fling with an older man can be instructive in many ways, and no doubt he finds you attractive.
To be well informed, one must read quickly a great number of merely instructive books. To be cultivated, one must read slowly and with a lingering appreciation the comparatively few books that have been written by men who lived, thought, and felt with style.
Our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India.
Understanding what and why did not work may be more instructive than celebrating our successes.
Stumble is worse than falling, because stumble is not as instructive as the falling!
Nothing is less instructive than a machine.
Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.
Let the young know they will never find a more interesting, more instructive book than the patient himself.
All situations in which the interrelationships between extremes are involved are the most interesting and instructive.
From the experience of the past we derive instructive lessons for the future.
The Prydain Companion is more than a quick reference or handy glossary, though it is all of that as well. Instructive, certainly. But, like any good companion, a pleasure to be with over a long period of time.
In a sense sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow. Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don't have it miss one of God's mercies.
The man I meet with is not often so instructive as the silence he breaks.
It was the maxim, I think, of Alphonsus of Aragon, that dead counsellors are safest. The grave puts an end to flattery and artifice, and the information we receive from books is pure from interest, fear, and ambition. Dead counsellors are likewise most instructive, because they are heard with patience and with reverence.
Everything a man writes about himself is instructive.
When Cuba lost their fossil fuel pipeline when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990. Overnight they had no choice, they had to transition to clean energy, they didn't have any fuel to burn, and they also had to transition to a healthy food system, an organic system - their economy is crashing, this was not a planned transition. This was a crisis, but a crisis nonetheless, in which pollution went away. And it's very instructive to see what happened to their health.
Failures are infinitely more instructive than successes.
