This is the trouble with cheating: there are no acceptable rules, or laws. It could be a smile, or dancing to a song that you considered to be indefinably 'ours'. It can feel like cheating to go to a restaurant that you used to go to with someone else. Keeping photographs of exes can infuriate, like retrospective cheating.
A. A. Gill
There are at least two retrospectives of my work each year in some country.
Abbas Kiarostami
Having a memoir and a retrospective of your work running almost simultaneously when you're still alive does feel a bit posthumous.
Anthony Browne
The failure of the United Nations - My failure is maybe, in retrospective, that I was not enough aggressive with the members of the Security Council.
Boutros Boutros-Ghali
The problem is when you are writing something in retrospective, it needs a lot of courage not to change, or you will forget a certain reality, and you will just take in consideration your view today.
When I was painting in art school - and I think many painters in the 1980s worked similarly - a finished painting would often be constructed from lots of other paintings underneath. Some of these individual layers of painting were better than others, but that was something that you would often only realise retrospectively.
Chris Ofili
Lovers often invest their first meetings with retrospective significance, as if to try to conjure the elements of the numinous out of the stubborn witness of the everyday.
Christopher Hitchens
I've been asked to do a retrospective since I was about 28 and I always thought that was a bit odd. It's great to look forward as an artist because in the future the possibilities are infinite; you look back and it's all fixed so it's a scary thing.
Damien Hirst
Normally, you should be dead if you have a retrospective.
Daphne Guinness
I was very young, and I was on vacation with my family, and there was a retrospective of old films, and one of them was 'The Phantom of the Opera' with Claude Rains that was in color. It was something very important for my career because I began to follow these stories that were morbid.
Dario Argento
The basis of drama is... the struggle of the hero towards a specific goal at the end of which he realises that what kept him from it was, in the lesser drama, civilisation and, in the great drama, the discovery of something that he did not set out to discover but which can be seen retrospectively as inevitable.
David Mamet
I think retrospective viewing of diving is nearly more important than some of the technology they are on about bringing in. If you do that and players get banned, it wouldn't take long before you'd cut it out.
David Moyes
I was 15 years old at university, studying economics and philosophy, and I saw a retrospective of Australian film. They were very raw. 'Picnic at Hanging Rock,' 'Gallipoli;' they were fantastic.
Deborah Kara Unger
I don't really think about having a retrospective on my high-school years. It's not something that, from a positive or a negative standpoint, is a driving force in my life.
Gary Bettman
The retrospective glance is a relatively easy gesture for us to make.
George Crumb
Stories, as much as we like to talk about them, retrospectively, as emanations of theme or worldview or intention, occur primarily as technical objects when they're being written. Or at least they do for me. They're the result of thousands of decisions made at speed during revision.
George Saunders
In 2011, 'Yourself in the World,' a book of my writings and interviews, was published in conjunction with a retrospective of my work at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Glenn Ligon
It's worth being suspicious of writers - or anyone! - who does that myth-making thing. There's always a tendency to retrospectively impose structures on a life. Life as it's lived has a far more complex shape.
Guy Gavriel Kay
At a certain time, an artist needs a big retrospective. At other times, they need a more focused exhibition. It's a different story each time; it's about establishing a dialogue.
Hans-Ulrich Obrist
I get anxious about a lot of things, that's the trouble. I get anxious about everything. I just can't stop thinking about things all the time. And here's the really destructive part - it's always retrospective. I waste time thinking of what I should have said or done.
Hugh Laurie
I feel some allegiance to pushing electric-guitar music into a different realm, somewhere that isn't retrospective. There's a lot of guitar bands that are a tribute to the 1970s or the Nineties. I want to experiment with guitar music more.
I felt most beautiful on the red carpet in Givenchy's sheer lace dress at a dinner hosted by Givenchy in honor of Marina Abramovich at the closing of her Museum of Modern Art retrospective, 'The Artist is Present', in 2010. It was the first time I had been dressed for an event, and everybody just fell in love with the dress.
It is almost a rule that the more complex a man is, the simpler his billing. A person with a retrospective ability gone rampant often would be called an historian. Similarly, one to whom reality doesn't seem to make sense gets dubbed a philosopher.
The 'Colours Of My Life' album is literally a 50-year retrospective.
Looking at myself retrospectively, how I survived, how I was reactionary as my surroundings were ever changing and I didn't have time to make thought out choices. My growth was quick, forced and dynamic.
My early education was in the public school system of Omaha, where, retrospectively, I realize that my high school training served me in good stead for the basic subjects of mathematics, English, foreign languages and history.
I went to the big Picasso retrospective at the Tate in the sixties, and I think I went to an Andy Warhol retrospective at the Tate in the sixties, too. My mother was very good at taking me to things like that. We lived in Reading, but we went on these cultural trips to London.
There's something to be said about being able to be retrospective about a certain age as opposed to just in it.
I don't want to sound like a retrospective person stuck in the past, but the fact remains that, in my day, everything was in the hands of the driver - the gear changes, the delicate art of clutch control during race starts, managing engine revs during gear changes - everything.
All religions have periods in their history which are looked back to with retrospective fear and trembling as eras of persecution, and each religion has its own book of martyrs.
When I was a young artist, and I would go look at other artists' career retrospectives, and I was often disappointed with the lack of story line... What was missing to me was the story of where the artist came from and how they got to where they were.
It is a simple but sometimes forgotten truth that the greatest enemy to present joy and high hopes is the cultivation of retrospective bitterness.
But after this natural burst of indignation, no man of sense, courage, or prudence will waste his time or his strength in retrospective reproaches or repinings.
I don't know if this is the kind of retrospective analysis that people are fond of applying to their work or actions, but it feels like I knew I was going to be famous and I knew that an element of that would be traumatic, so that if I could make myself something big and otherworldly, it would be a kind of defence.
As an historical novelist - there are few jobs more retrospective. I dumped science at an early age.
I've had people ask me to come and work for them. I went to Vienna and did three scenes in a movie for a guy that I met at a retrospective of Cassavetes films. It's a great way to travel, to meet people, to see different countries and cultures.
I am not really sure that Diana Vreeland did Yves Saint Laurent a favor, as opposed to the world, by putting that exhibition at the Met in 1983. Because I'm sure that Saint Laurent started looking back at his own work. You see that with artists, don't you? Once they get their first retrospective, it's really hard for them to push ahead.
There is no way in which we can retrospectively erase the Treaty of Vienna or the Great Irish Famine. It is a peculiar feature of human actions that, once performed, they can never be recuperated. What is true of the past will always be true of it.
People say I am stuck in childhood, but it's not that. I remember seeing a Matisse retrospective, and you could see he started out one way, and then he tried something different, and then he seemed to spend his whole life trying to get back to the first thing.
A lot of my activity in the theatre, and even in writing poems, was a kind of retrospective aggro on the English teacher who wouldn't allow me to read poetry aloud.
I thought it would be my one and only exhibition, so I decided to call it My Major Retrospective.
Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: it has to be shattered before being ascertained.
