“Everyone thinks that because my dad was really well known for his body that I would have that pressure too, but the truth is that I don't look at those pictures of him being really muscley and say, "yep that's really what I want to look like!"”
Quote collection
Thinking Quotes — page 722 of 4756
“There's more roles now to fill since Trump's in. There's this refusal of power. I think progressives are actually literally uncomfortable with the exercise of power, because of what you learn. When you're too educated you understand the total disconnect of the exercise of power.”
“Rather than thinking of sound and sense in my essays as two opposing principles, two perpendicular trajectories, as they are often considered in conversations around translation, or even as two disassociated phenomena that can be brought together to collaborate with more or less success, I think of sound as sense. Sound has its own meaning, and it's one of the many non-semantic dimensions of meaning in language. I want to emphasize is the formal dynamic between language-as-information and language-as-art-material.”
“I think readers nowadays are happy to have genres blurred. We're seeing that on screen too: The Pirates of the Caribbean mashes up history and fantasy, Cowboys and Aliens mixes the Western and the Science Fiction genres.”
“I'm always amazed that anyone is paying attention to anything that I do, you know what I mean? I feel like I'm constantly having conversations with people where they're saying, "I didn't know that you could be serious," and then other people are saying, "Oh, I didn't know that you could do comedy." And so I don't know if it really helped too much with this. I like to think that it does.”
“I would love to be able to get behind the camera and direct actors. I think that would be a lot of fun.”
“As you get older you don't want to just do the same thing, otherwise there's not much point. I think it's more or less trying to write things that, perhaps, say more by doing less, or you're always trying to refine things, make things a little simpler, a little more essential.”
“I suppose ever since I was about 14, I remember listening to "Sgt. Pepper's," and I remember thinking, "how do you possibly write songs like that?" I remember starting to try and write songs around that age, but just sitting around with an acoustic guitar, and try to come up with ideas for songs, and that's just what I've done ever since. I just never really stopped doing that, I suppose.”
“The Men at Work thing is always there, it's always going to be there. It's not something I consciously think that much about anymore. The thing that stays with you is the songs, which is a good thing for me, because the songs are the things that stand the test of time.”
“I tend to write pretty much by myself. I always did that anyway. I used to write with Ron Strykert 'cause he was the only guitarist and we played well together. We lived in the same place. I would play a certain style and he would kind of dance around what I did, in a sense. I learned from him and also vice-versa. With this band, I think I bounce ideas off everybody. Perhaps on the next album they'll be more collaborative stuff, but for the last 2-3 years, I've been pretty well writing by myself.”
“In the mid nineteenth century, the typical murderer was a drunken illiterate; a hundred years later the typical murderer regards himself as a thinking man.”
“I have always believed in the magic of childhood and think that if you get your life right that magic should never end.”
“The only thing I can think to do is if the Democratic Party can do what the Republicans have done, which is go in there and take control of these legislatures and governors' areas.”
“A lot of people, when they first hear about the Underground Railroad, think it really is a subway or a locomotive. When they find out it's not, they feel a little disappointed. So I thought, What if it was a literal underground train network traveling from state to state, with each state it goes through representing a different opportunity or danger?”
“I think each book has its own way of accommodating my concerns, whether it's about race, America, technology, the city.”
“I write books and either people read them or they don't read them. The rise of Facebook or e-books doesn't change the difficulty level of writing sentences and thinking up new ideas.”
“I always have a few ideas that are percolating, and then after I've finished a book and it's a year later, and things are sort of festering and things are disgusting in my house and I have to get back to work, whatever project I keep thinking about is the one I end up working on. Sort of a very simple process of elimination.”
“I think being a writer was a crappy job when you just had typewriters. It was crappy when we just had ink and paper. And it's sort of crappy now. It's always just you and the page. That doesn't change.”
“I think you're only post-racial when you stop asking if you're post-racial. When the Neanderthals finally stopped asking themselves if they were in a post-saber tooth society, that's when they were post-saber tooth.”
“I think the world's big enough for all kinds of zombies. You can have yours and I can have mine. I think by going with slow zombies I maybe have been asserting my own kind of zombie snobbery, but I don't begrudge the youngsters their tackling, running, jumping zombies.”