Word: inventive
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...director whom most writers and actors only meet when they are asleep and dreaming. Actors agree he is their ideal one-man audience. He sits in rehearsals and howls and chuckles until the actors get delusions and stare across the footlights at 1,500 Mike Nicholses. He lets them invent and improvise on their own. When in doubt he says, "I don't believe...
From the company's viewpoint, the trick is not so much to invent something as to find practical uses for it. When Du Pont developed its new plastic, Surlyn, one customer cracked: "You've got the world's greatest answer. Now start looking for questions." Whenever one of its scientists does find a genie in a bottle, the company is quick to commit everything to exploit it: more scientists, plants, funds-and, importantly, more time and patience-than any other company...
Surely someone at Harvard can write. The college is full of kooks and wits and beats. One of them must be unhinged or inspired enough to invent a plot or evoke a mood. There must be somebody with the gift or the application to produce, if not a polished work, at least an interesting failure. But if so, he's not submitting his stuff to the Advocate...
...life and a high art; Machiavelli who made it a cardinal principle of statecraft; while Mussolini was by no means the first Italian leader to perish finally believing the deceptions he had himself created. At the start, Barzini thinks, Mussolini "watched him self playing the great role he was invent ing as gusto," he but went over the along, years he hamming at it began to with believe the stirring show and the lies and flattery, came to read his own news papers with pleasure, and mistook the parades for real military power, until "in the end he lived within...
Gadflying is an honorable calling, but it has its pitfalls. The truly conscientious gadfly is apt to run out of material at around age 33 and find himself in the embarrassing position of gadding at the same old targets. The less conscientious gadfly may even invent new subjects to gad about...