“The point here is ... to be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.”
Thoughtful feeling
Thoughtful Quotes — page 171 of 303
“The way I think about things and experience things is not particularly linear, and it's not orderly, and it's not pyramidical, and there are a lot of loops.”
“When you speak, ask questions. Don't lecture.”
“People always make this totally artificial distinction between what is commercial and what is good. They quote that maxim "Nobody ever lost money underestimating the public's taste" and I think that's very wrongheaded. I like to believe the audience is actually intelligent, because it's made up of other people like yourself.”
“Everyone just wants to see what you can do for yourself. People think that just because I have some big ridiculous number on my myspace page that it's all easy for me. People are interested but I don't come home to labels waiting outside my house.”
“Take a look at yourself, the mirror's revealing. If yeen got it, yeen got it the theory is brilliant.”
“I didn't really have a major role in how it was described. I wanted it to be a collection of essays where each storyline could be contained.”
“What you need and what you want aren't the same things.”
“I hope when people ask what you're going to do with your English degree and/or creative writing degree you'll say: Continue my bookish examination of the contradictions and complexities of human motivation and desire; or maybe just: Carry it with me, as I do everything that matters. And then smile very serenely until they say, Oh.”
“Unless I'm writing in the Igbo language, I use a language developed elsewhere, which is English. That affects the way I write. It even affects to some extent the stories I write.”
“Americans, it seems to me, tend to protect their children from the harshness of life, in their interest. That's not the way my people rear their children. They let them experience the world as it is.”
“There must be areas in which a particular character does not represent you.”
“E-mail importance is defined by the receiver, not the sender.”
“In the act of deciding what to eliminate, you place value on what's left behind.”
“I read a lot of summaries about the story [ based on the Cyrano de Bergerac. ]. I also watched Roxanne, the movie starring Steve Martin.”
“Forty-one rules aren't so many - St. Benedict had 73 to keep the brethren on the straight and narrow.”
“How much do they be paying you?" he asked mellowly. "The usual salary. A little more than they think I'm worth and a little less than I think I'm worth.”
“Make sure you have your own life before becoming someone's wife ~spoken to Oprah in an interview”
“There are GMO skeptics more in Europe maybe than in other places, but not exclusively.”
“We must keep our thought secret, and judge everything by it, while talking like the people.”