If an essay has a 'motive,' it is linked more to happenstance and opportunity than to the driven will. A genuine essay is not a doctrinaire tract or a propaganda effort or a broadside.
Cynthia Ozick
Movies, to a large extent, stand or fall on the strength of their scripts. But a documentary is a collection of found objects: fragments you've collected, accidents of interview and happenstance, pieces of stock footage that surface in the course of six to nine months of research and production.
David Fanning
I believe that life is chaotic, a jumble of accidents, ambitions, misconceptions, bold intentions, lazy happenstances, and unintended consequences, yet I also believe that there are connections that illuminate our world, revealing its endless mystery and wonder.
David Maraniss
If you do good work, you start to make a name for yourself and things can come around. Weird little happenstances happen.
David Walton
Two friends and I decided to get tattoos of different animals. My one friend got a bulldog. My other friend got a bull, I think, and then I got a shark. Two years later, there was a cartoon called 'Street Sharks,' and by happenstance, it looked eerily reminiscent of my tattoo. Actually, it was identical.
Edge
There's so much happenstance, so many accidents - stumbling into something and finding it interesting and living with it over time and building on it. It's okay to work from doubt. You need to be willing to not know.
Ellen Gallagher
My work is on the one hand laboured, and on the other completely happenstance and intuitive.
My work is on the one hand laboured, and on the other completely happenstance and intuitive. But that's the swish in the work, I think. It's really important to me that the work isn't just sitting on top of something, that the materials are woven together - that they are recognisable and from the world.
I can't say I have had a ton of Hollywood exposure, as strange as that sounds. But by pure happenstance, I trailed Javier Bardem on a red carpet at a film festival in Palm Springs years ago. He's one of my idols, and I endeavor to walk an artistic path similar to his own.
Ethan Peck
Perhaps the most pernicious strain of contemporary criticism says one thing before it says anything else, says it to whatever historical event or cultural happenstance is supposedly at issue: 'You can't fool me.'
Greil Marcus
As for 'Great Expectations', it is up there for me with the world's greatest novels, not least as it vindicates plot as no other novel I can think of does, since what there is to find out is not coincidence or happenstance but the profoundest moral truth.
Howard Jacobson
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.
Ian Fleming
What is the one country in the Middle East that has not been attacked by ISIS? One. That is Iran. That is more than happenstance, I'm sure.
Jim Mattis
Serendipity is nice, but hoping for luck and the magic of happenstance shouldn't be an excuse for a lack of proactivity. I had to learn for myself that waiting isn't a life plan.
Karen Finerman
I went to really good New York City public schools that had arts programs. So in junior high, I got into the drama department. From there, I went to a performing arts high school in New York City called Laguardia and I just kind of fell into the professional side by happenstance.
Merritt Wever
The effect hip-hop had on me was enormous. I was exposed to it by happenstance. My father worked at a radio station in New York called WKTU Disco 92. It was the first radio station in New York City to play disco in the late '70s.
Michael Rapaport
I'm very proud of the people with whom I've worked. It's an amazing collection that just by happenstance happened.
Norman Lloyd
We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.
Penelope Lively
Not only is it not remarkable to be a single woman, there's no stigma attached. You see more and more women choosing to be single as well as happenstance.
Pepper Schwartz
It's luck that one thing works out and one doesn't, it's sort of happenstance.
Richard Linklater
I am placed in situations with opportunities in those situations that others are not. I don't believe that that is happenstance. I believe that there is a God that has a plan for me.
The older you get, the more you realise how happenstance... has helped to determine your path through life.
Often, African-Americans' work is accepted as if we did something artistic by happenstance. It's almost like, 'They make TV shows the same way they dance. It's just natural!'
Becoming an astronaut was a little bit of happenstance for me.
