Calling fishing a hobby is like calling brain surgery a job.
— Paul Schullery
Delighting Brain Surgery quotations
Filmmaking is a huge privilege; it's not brain surgery. It's art, and art is supposed to be an enjoyable process, and it is an enjoyable experience for me.

Brain surgery is a terrible profession.
If I did not feel it will become different in my lifetime, I should hate it.

The fact that there is no such thing as a perfect anti-sepsis does not mean that one might as well do brain surgery in a sewer.
Unpredictability. Accidents. Not good when you’re engaging in, say, brain surgery, but when lighting...wonderful!
This is brain surgery. Ski masks on my bullets, let 'em commit brain burglary. Emergency, it's an emergency. Someone in all black left the whole scene burgundy.

Painting is as difficult as brain surgery. It's not that relaxing. But that's the discipline.
I was angry at my parents when I had to have brain surgery, that they weren't still around, because no matter how old you are you want you parents when you're going through something like that.
When you're making a film you start living with it, and I find myself sitting down and figuring out a sound or melody that would go with a film, or a particular period. It's not brain surgery, you just kind of feel it along.

I think I'm still trying to find my feet as an actor.
And I know it ain't brain surgery, but it confuses me and it comes between me and my sleep a lot.
The press don't like to say nice things because nice is boring.
It's much better to label me the devil. What we do is not brain surgery. We are entertainers, plain and simple, and we're responsible to bring that money back, to make a profit.
I think I've always had a pretty good time in life.
I mean, I've had major trouble, and major brain surgeries, and challenges in relationships - like anyone else - but overall, when I wake up in the morning, and I'm aware, I'm like, "Ok. What's happening today? What's next?"

What makes you think painting is any less difficult than brain surgery?
With all due respect to the world's great drummers - it ain't brain surgery.
It's not brain surgery. It's not nuclear physics. It's television. It's only television.

Soccer isn't brain surgery, have fun.
So long as I get some sleep and get to take care of myself and eat healthy and that sort of thing, I'm OK. I'm not out there digging ditches and it's not brain surgery.
Janet Yellen at the FED is equivalent to having a biology schoolteacher who has never seen blood perform brain surgery.

Acting's entertainment. It's not brain surgery.
Don't cut bangs with a hatchet. Don't do brain surgery with a pickax.
Self-criticism, like self-administered brain surgery, is perhaps not a good idea. Can the 'self' see the 'self' with any objectivity?

What I've learned is that unless it's an emergency, like a fire or brain surgery, hierarchy is not necessary and may be damaging. If you have a hierarchy, you're repeating the strengths and weaknesses of one person without allowing for the accumulative strength of a group.
It's a frustrating game because the situations so drastically change at different times over the course of the week, the game, the season. It feels like brain surgery at times.
The only thing that I haven't done is perform brain surgery on myself.
I've been very, very lucky. I've spared Shakespeare undue stress by not doing that.

Forget about speech problems just saying the words "brain surgery" sucks the air out of a room.
I never felt inspired to write this book [ I Had Brain Surgery, What's Your Excuse?], like I did with the cat or dog book; I felt compelled. At the time (May 1999), I was planning to write and illustrate an altogether different memoir, a book about my decision whether or not to have a baby.
Brain surgery is not like politics and vice versa.
I couldn't listen to music with lyrics for the first few months after the brain surgery, because they were too complex and disturbing. So I listened to a lot of classical music. I didn't really want to read, either, so I listened to books on tape or watched movies. I also re-taught myself all of my childhood piano pieces. It helped me repair my brain.
You can see that the care he took defiling the beauty he had forced in them was as precise and clean as his good hands which at night had developed the negatives, floating the sheets in the correct acids and watching the faces and breasts and pubic triangles and sofas emerge. The making and destroying coming from the same source, same lust, same surgery his brain was capable of. (On New Orleans photographer E. J. Bellocq)
Everyone also needs to realize that business is not rocket science.
Everything that you haven't done before, you don't know it because you haven't done it before. It's not brain surgery and you figure it out as you do it.
Everybody has a talent, whether it's scrapbooking, or kite-flying, or brain surgery, or writing, everybody has a talent. And if they discover it, and they turn it to their purposes and make a living out of it, then they become not "that person," but they become "that writer" or "that doctor" or "that supervisor."
People know where romantic comedies are going.
It's not brain surgery to figure out the end of a romantic comedy.
So-called restoration is at least as tricky as brain surgery.
Most pictures expire under scalpel and sponge.
When you're younger you have a lot of ideas and you're probably more insecure, all those things. I work with young actors now and I see their insecurities and I make fun of them. I don't make fun of them but I make them laugh, because I know what they're going through. When you get older you think 'It's only a movie after all, it's not brain surgery.'
The interesting thing with acting, actually, is that you get to be so many different people that you get to do so much research on so many different things that I've learned so much about brain surgery and about astrophysicist-type of things and traveling to amazing parts of the world.