“The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried [phrase-making] to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment’s reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication.”
Quote collection
People Quotes — page 862 of 5018
“I never met an author who admitted that people did not buy his book because it was dull.”
“Things were easier for the old novelists who saw people all of a piece. Speaking generally, their heroes were good through and through, their villains wholly bad.”
“The worst of having so much tact was that you never quite knew whether other people were acting naturally or being tactful too. [The human element]”
“If people waited to know one another before they married, the world wouldn't be as overpopulated as it is now.”
“People are always a little disconcerted when you don't recognize them, they are so important to themselves, it is a shock to discover of what small importance they are to others. [The human element]”
“Everything today is such a massive visual show. It's very rare to get a film where the characters are raw and real - and you can take people back to where they are watching live cinema. With character-driven action. Not visual-driven action.”
“My tribute to mystical, magical trees that the Cherokee called "standing people. . . ."”
“It is easy to suppose that few people realize on that occasion, which comes to all of us, when we look at the blue sky for the first time, that is to say: not merely see it, but look at it and experience it and for the first time have a sense that we live in the center of a physical poetry, a geography that would be intolerable except for the non-geography that exists there - few people realize that they are looking at the world of their own thoughts and the world of their own feelings.”
“People ought to like poetry the way a child likes snow & they would if poets wrote it.”
“God is gracious to some very peculiar people.”
“Life is an affair of people not of places. But for me, life is an affair of places and that is the trouble.”
“People look at me in many ways. They've said, 'The guy has no regard for money.' That is not true. I have had regard for money. It depends on who's saying that. Some people worship money as something you've got to have piled up in a big pile somewhere. I've only thought about money in one way, and that is to do something with it. I don't think there's a thing I own that I will ever get the benefit of except through doing things with it. I don't even want the dividends from the stock in the studio, because the government's going to take it away. I'd rather have that in (the company) working.”
“If the United States haven't grown poets, on any scale of grandeur, it is certain that they import, print, and read more poetry than any equal number of people elsewhere -- probably more than the rest of the world combined. Poetry (like a grand personality) is a growth of many generations -- many rare combinations. To have great poets, there must be great audiences too.”
“A simple separate person is not contained between his hat and his boots.”
“In all people I see myself - none more, and not one a barleycorn less; And the good or bad I say of myself, I say of them.”
“But the people are ungrammatical, untidy, and their sins gaunt and ill-bred.”
“Why are there men and women that while they are nigh me the sunlight expands my blood? Why when they leave me do my pennants of joy sink flat and lank?”
“It's fun to write about myself, but I feel like I would bore people with that.”
“Where do you get the gall to call the people who died in 9/11 technocrats when you sit around and get a $90,000 paycheck from the government you purport to hate?”