First of all, to have a career in this business is extremely hard. To have a long career is even harder. To have a long career where you’re getting good work is almost impossible.
I hate the implication that I was creating drama. It’s like when men use the word “crazy” to describe an ex. The translation is: “She expected emotional maturity from me.”
I really wanted to get out of Wales. When I was growing up, I was a little rough around the edges, and I tried to do whatever I could to develop a musical style. All the music I was raised on was Alban Berg, Schoenberg—a lot of strange groupings. And there was a little library in my village; the library was put there by the coal miners’ union, and if you wanted to learn anything about a song or a style of music you could find something in the library that would have that, and I went for it. That’s where I found Stockhausen. So I was growing up with real music. [emphasis mine]
Journalists, as a group, have to believe that the act of writing can bring light to darkness, help our fellow-citizens make sense of the world, and compose the first draft of history. The job, in many ways, is about converting chaos into clichés, in order to satisfy the profession’s clichés about its own importance.
It is better to be spurred to acquire scholarship because you enjoy the poetry, than to suppose that you enjoy the poetry because you have acquired the scholarship.
--T. S. Eliot
an essay on Dante (1930)
I have not found the exact source.
I had a friend in junior high—I don’t know why I was friends with him, probably because I couldn’t get anyone else to be my friend—and “Happy Days” had just come out, and he thought he was the Fonz. He thought he was the coolest guy. I remember thinking, He’s happier than I am, and it’s just because he doesn’t know any better. There’s something to be said for that kind of unfounded confidence.
Two and two continue to make four, in spite of the whine of the amateur for three, or the cry of the critic for five.
You start out playing rock and roll so you can have sex and do drugs.
But you end up doing drugs so you can still play rock and roll and have sex.
Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.
[T]here were some initial difficulties when the director first told me... that if the film was to have any semblance of reality at all there would have to be moments when other people were on-screen at the same time I was.
My mother was a Methodist, but my father was Anglican: thus my mother was below my father’s level socially, as such things were accounted then. (If she’d lived, my Grandmother Adelia would never have allowed the marriage, or so I decided later. My mother would have been too far down the ladder for her – also too prudish, too earnest, too provincial. Adelia would have dragged my father off to Montreal – hooked him up to a debutante, at the very least. Someone with better clothes.)
I belonged to a small minority of boys who were lacking in physical strength and athletic prowess. ... We found our refuge in science. ... We learned that science is a revenge of victims against oppressors, that science is a territory of freedom and friendship in the midst of tyranny and hatred.
Freeman DysonKafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house. His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls. Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
Comics are often seen as a gateway to “real reading” by those who don’t understand the difference between reading pictures and just looking at them; comics are no more words with pictures than singing is just words with yelling.
Captivated by [Mary Todd’s] lively manner, intelligent face, clear blue eyes, and dimpled smile, Lincoln reportedly said, “I want to dance with you in the worst way." And, Mary laughingly told her cousin later..., "he certainly did.”
I am firm, you are obstinate, he is a pig-headed fool.
I am righteously indignant, you are annoyed, he is making a fuss over nothing.
I have reconsidered the matter, you have changed your mind, he has gone back on his word.
It sometimes seems as if all literary-minded women see themselves, sooner or later, as Alice, just as literary-minded men have always seen themselves as Hamlet. (Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch; women choose Alice because every woman sees herself as the only reasonable creature among crazy people who think that they are disinherited monarchs.)
His phone rang. The ring on Bernie's cell phone sounded like those old phones in black-and-white movies we often watched. I liked watching them because black and white was so easy for me to see; as for why Bernie liked them, I wasn't sure, just knew that if it came to a choice between black and white and color, he always chose black and white.
Baer embodied the knowledge and technique of industry; Kroner personified the faith, the near-holiness, the spirit of the complicated venture. Kroner, in fact, had a poor record as an engineer and had surprised Paul from time to time with his ignorance or misunderstanding of technical matters; but he had the priceless quality of believing in the system, and of making others believe in it, too, and do as they were told.
