A Quote by Hans Bethe

Well, I come down in the morning and I take up a pencil and
 I try to THINK. — © Hans Bethe
Well, I come down in the morning and I take up a pencil and I try to THINK.
I have a method of working on music: I'll get up in the morning and throw down some drums on my drum machine, and then I'll come back later and try to pop off rhythms to it.
I don't think about commercial concerns when I first come up with something. When I sit down at the piano, I try to come up with something that moves me.
It's very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down. I can't wait until morning - it'll be gone.
It was stupid behaviour. And you take a look at the explosion, and it knocks you down and you wake up every morning and you're scared and you're depressed and sad, and you kind of got to let that knock you down and knock you down.
I think we work well when there are absolutely no distractions whatsoever, because we tend to come up with the best ideas around one or two in the morning, so you have to be plugging away.
I think when you're knee-deep in coming up with editorial plans, the desire to sit down and pencil something is pretty strong.
My dreams are the usual incoherent nonsense. Like most writers, at some point in my career I thought, well, I have these great dreams but I always forget them in the morning so I’ll leave a pad on my bedside table so I can write it down, and then you have some incredible dream and you write it down and the next morning you wake up and you’ve written ‘purple socks’.
People on the outside think there's something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn't like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that's all there is to it.
The best ideas come from sitting down with a piece of paper and a pencil.
I try to write every day. Sometimes the things come out well, and sometimes they don't. When they come out well you think, Wow, I must be really great; and when they come out poorly, you think you must be terrible, but the truth is that's how any process works.
You can't give up. Sometimes you get knocked down, but you have to get back up, fighting. You have to think about the others who come behind you as well. And you have to think of the example that you set for others.
Now we may have more preachers out there than we have drinkers. But a fellow told me a story one time about a man down in Kentuckywhere they make bourbon. And he said you can take a jigger or two jiggers and get by all right. But if you try to take the whole bottle why you have lost what you started with. So don't try to take it too quick. And don't try to do all of it at once. I don't do much promising. I tell what my goals are and then I try to wrap it up and put a blue ribbon on it and get it delivered. We say put the coonskin on the wall.
You do sometimes watch performances and just think, 'I may as well give up. I won't reach that. I may as well give up.' But then there are other actors you watch and just think, 'Oh my God, yes, I want to try and do that. Try and be like that'. And Bryan Cranston is someone who I'd like to try and be like.
Well, I get my subject on Wednesday night; I think it out carefully on Thursday, and make my rough sketch; on Friday morning I begin, and stick to it all day, with my nose well down on the block.
Try to imagine a man setting out for the day without a single prejudice. ... Inevitably he would be in a state of paralysis. He could not get up in the morning, or choose his necktie, or make his way to the office, ... or, to come right down to the essence of the thing, even maintain his identity.
I always secretly loved the art of makeup as a child. I would come up with stories and characters and try on my mom's Maybelline eyeliner when she wasn't home. It was a very old-school pencil - you had to burn the tip to make it smudgy enough to use.
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