“If someone tells me that I've hurt their feelings I'm still waiting to hear what your point is.”
Thoughtful feeling
Thoughtful Quotes — page 210 of 303
“Even with all the advantages of retrospect, and a lot of witnesses dead and gone, you can't make your life look as if you intended it or you were consistent. All you can show is how you dealt with various hands.”
“Yes, I, well, when I write, as often as I can, I try to write as if I'm talking to people. It doesn't always work, and one shouldn't always try it, but I try and write as if I am talking, and trying to engage the reader in conversation.”
“I could not possibly improve on the sentiment, but I don't think it ought to depend on the current austerities. Isn't Christmas a moral and aesthetic nightmare whether or not the days are prosperous?”
“You can be a Polish American, or an Arab American, or a Greek American but you can't be English American. Why not?”
“Your least favorite virtue, or nominee for the most overrated one? Faith. Closely followed—in view of the overall shortage of time—by patience.”
“When I was writing Love and Lies, I was going over a lot of my old notes to see if there were any insights in them. I was obsessed with Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer. These are not guys that you want to go to for understanding the nature of love. They clearly didn't get it.”
“A man's just gotta know his limits”
“I found out that a lot of my liberal friends weren't liberal because they weren't liberal about approaching anybody else's ideas, or at least standing for it. They started getting really animalistic about, "I can't even associate with this guy. He's stupid. He's an idiot."”
“It is a good rule in life to be wary of the company of people who think of themselves in the third person, no matter how well justified they might seem to be in doing so.”
“First-rate science fiction was, and remains, more interesting than second-rate art.”
“If we want a book to do more than what it does, that's a condemnation. If we want it to do more of what it does, that's an endorsement.”
“One way or another, all the poets of the thirties and forties reacted to Auden, either by rejecting him or trying to absorb him.”
“In the movies first impressions are everything. Or, to put it less drastically, in the movies there are no later impressions without a first impression, because you will have stopped watching. Sometimes a critic persuades you to give an unpromising-looking movie a chance, but the movie had better convey the impression pretty quickly that the critic might be right.”
“The biggest challenge in working together is simply listening.”
“Honestly, the two main things that I always look for is, when I read the script for the first time, do I read it quickly? Because if I read it quick, that's an important telltale sign.”
“I think each book has its own way of accommodating my concerns, whether it's about race, America, technology, the city.”
“I can't say that you should extract this or that value from my books explicitly. They are up for interpretation. In terms of the obligation, I think we're all individuals on this planet, trying to scratch our way through the day, and if you're writing a book exposing atrocities in Rwanda or writing a murder mystery set in a mountain village, I think both ways of spending you time are valid and both books are probably fine to read.”
“That's what the movies do. They don't entertain us, they don't send the message: 'We care.' They give us lines to say, they assign us parts: John Wayne, Theda Bara, Shirley Temple, take your pick.”
“Interrogate yours hidden assumptions”