Eighty percent of a picture is writing, the other twenty percent is the execution, such as having the camera on the right spot and being able to afford to have good actors in all parts.
--
As quoted in The New Hollywood : American Movies in the '70s (1975) by Axel MadsenBilly Wilder
Updike, I think, has never had an unpublished thought. And … he's got an ability to put it in very lapidary prose. But … there's eighty percent absolute dreck, and twenty percent priceless stuff. And you just have to wade through so much purple gorgeous empty writing to get to anything that's got any kind of heartbeat in it.
John Updike
The haiku that reveals seventy to eighty percent of its subject is good. Those that reveal fifty to sixty percent, we never tire of.
Matsuo Basho
It turns out that only twenty percent of human beings have a sense of irony — which means that eighty percent of the world takes everything at face value. I can’t imagine anything worse than that. Okay, maybe I can, but imagine reading the morning newspaper and believing it all to be true on some level.
Douglas Coupland
Guessing what the pitcher is going to throw is 80 percent of being a successful hitter. The other 20 percent is just execution.
Hank Aaron
John Cage, composer, painter, and all-round thinker and cultural catalyst, said that if you introduce twenty percent of novelty into any artwork, watch out -- you are going to lose eighty percent of your audience at once. He said you would lose them for fifteen years. Cage was interested in fifteen-year cycles. But he was hopelessly optimistic. The general appreciation, for example, of Western painting has got stuck around Impressionism, and that was 130 years ago, not fifteen years ago.
Peter Greenaway
Wilder, Billy
Wilder, Thornton
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