“I'm realistic. Getting to everybody is not the goal here. The people you can affect in any way - that's who you want to get to.”
Quote collection
People Quotes — page 1023 of 5018
“I do look at songwriting as a lot of work. I don't overintellectualize music as a special medium that only some people deserve to do. I think it's something you do if you put the work in.”
“She was a keen observer, a precise user of language, sharp-tongued and funny. She could stir your emotions. Yes, really, that's what she was so good at - stirring people's emotions, moving you. And she knew she had this power...I only realized later. At the time, I had no idea what she was doing to me.”
“People soon get tired of things that aren't boring, but not of what is boring.”
“If I stayed here, something inside me would be lost forever—something I couldn't afford to lose. It was like a vague dream, a burning, unfulfilled desire. The kind of dream people have only when they're seventeen.”
“I realize now that the reality of things is not something you convey to people but something you make.”
“Suicides? Heart attacks? The papers didn't seem interested. The world was full of ways to die, too many to cover. Newsworthy deaths had to be exceptional. Most people go unobserved.”
“Whenever an occasion arose in which she needed an opinion on something in the wider world, she borrowed her husband's. If this had been all there was to her, she wouldn't have bothered anyone, but as is so often the case with such women, she suffered from an incurable case of of pretentiousness. Lacking any internalized values of her own, such people can arrive at a standpoint only by adopting other people's standards or views. The only principle that governs their minds is the question "How do I look?”
“I never trust people with no appetite. It's like they're always holding something back on you.”
“Certain kinds of knowledge rob people of their sleep.”
“Rousseau defined civilizations as when people build fences.”
“Even if you don't acknowledge it, people die, and guys sleep with girls. That's just how it is.”
“Ordinary imperfect people, always choose similarly imperfect people as friends.”
“They take the circuits out of people’s brains that make it possible for them to think for themselves. Their world is like the one that George Orwell depicted in his novel. I’m sure you realize that there are plenty of people who are looking for exactly that kind of brain death. It makes life a lot easier. You don’t have to think about difficult things, just shut up and do what your superiors tell you to do.”
“If you try to use your head to think about things, people don't want to have anything to do with you”
“So this was how secrets got started, I thought to myself. People constructed them little by little.”
“They put up with such strenuous training, and where did their thoughts, their hopes and dreams, disappear to? When people pass away, do their thoughts just vanish?”
“Some people can work their butts off and never get what they're aiming for while others can get it without any effort at all.”
“You have to be practical. So every time I say, if you want to write a novel you have to be practical, people get bored. They are disappointed. They are expecting a more dynamic, creative, artistic thing to say. What I want to say is: you have to be practical.”
“Most near-future fictions are boring. It's always dark and always raining, and people are so unhappy.”