Early Work Quotes

• Formula for success: rise early, work hard, strike oil.

  J. Paul Getty

  Inspirational, Hard Work, Hard Times

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• In my early work, I tried to hide my personality, my psychological state, my emotions. This was partly due to my feelings about myself and partly due to my feelings about painting at the time. I sort of stuck to my guns for a while but eventually it seemed like a losing battle. Finally one must simply drop the reserve.

  Jasper Johns

  Gun, Personality, Feelings

  Jasper Johns (1987). “Jasper Johns: The Seasons ; [exhibition] January 31-March 7, 1987, Leo Castelli Gallery”

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• My first two books are out of print and, okay, they can sleep there comfortably. It's early work, derivative work.

  Mary Oliver

  Book, Sleep, Two

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• An artist's early work is inevitably made up of a mixture of tendencies and interests, some of which are compatible and some of which are in conflict

  Bridget Riley

  Artist, Mixtures, Conflict

  Piet Mondrian, Bridget Riley, Haags Gemeentemuseum (1997). “Mondrian: nature to abstraction : from the Gemeentemuseum, the Hague”, Tate Gallery Pubn

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• [When you are an actor] it's not a burden to go to work whether it's hard work, whether it's super early work, whatever. So, I go there because I want to be there. I want to do this. That helps a lot.

  Vanessa Paradis

  Hard Work, Actors, Want

  Source: collider.com

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• For years, my early work with Roger Penrose seemed to be a disaster for science. It showed that the universe must have begun with a singularity, if Einstein's general theory of relativity is correct. That appeared to indicate that science could not predict how the universe would begin.

  Stephen Hawking

  Years, Roger, Disaster

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• We have to focus on his early work, and just one or two of his movies, and elements of his TV shows, to keep his memory pure. People now know that Elvis could play a mean rhythm guitar himself, and needed no other musicians to perform a great song. But Elvis was not just a rock star, he was an all-round entertainer.

  Pete Townshend

  Song, Stars, Memories

  Digital Spy, June 29, 2015.

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• Much of the early work focused on dopamine and we were really looking for rewarding sorts of effects and sure enough, we only found that. But you can destroy the main dopamine-producing structures of the brain and you can still get an animal to self-administer drugs like cocaine.

  Carl Hart

  Animal, Self, Drug

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Work on causal theories of knowledge - early work by Armstrong, and Dretske, and Goldman - seemed far more satisfying. As I started to see the ways in which work in the cognitive sciences could inform our understanding of central epistemological issues, my whole idea of what the philosophical enterprise is all about began to change. Quine certainly played a role here, as did Putnam's (pre-1975) work in philosophy of science, and the exciting developments that went on in that time in philosophy of mind.

  Hilary Kornblith

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Ideas

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I can look at my early work and see what a pained struggle it was to draw what I was drawing. I was trying so hard to get this specific look that was in my head, and always falling short.

  Daniel Clowes

  Struggle, Fall, Drawing

  Interview with Keith Phipps, www.avclub.com. March 30, 2012.

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• In my early work I didn't use much colour. I had no confidence about how I could do this.

  Michael Craig-Martin

  Use, Colour, No Confidence

  Source: www.artzip.org

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• There are some very similar moments in the early work where the focus was on drawing, abstraction and fragmentation. Then it moved to the development of ideas. Lately it has become what architecture should be, which is more fluid organization. There has not been so much 'a change' but 'a development'.

  Zaha Hadid

  Organization, Ideas, Drawing

  Source: www.designboom.com

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• Then I realized my early work did have something special that audiences adored apart from what I humbly thought about them. They occupy a distinguished niche in Italian film history and probably always will.

  Dario Argento

  Italian, Film History, Special

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• They [the critics] deal with Schoenberg's early works and all their wealth by classifying them, with the music-historical cliché, as late romantic post-Wagnerian. One might just as well dispose of Beethoven as a late-classicist post-Haydnerian.

  Theodor Adorno

  Historical, Might, Wealth

  Theodor Adorno, Richard Leppert, Susan H. Gillespie (2002). “Essays on Music”, p.148, Univ of California Press

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• As I look over my work, I mean every time I look over my early work, I see, yes, I could do that then and then I could do that and that... That may be the hardest thing for a writer, at least for a poet, to tell what the identity of his work is.

  Kenneth Koch

  Mean, Identity, Looks

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• People wanted to get me published, and my early work was so weird that they weren't getting anywhere. I thought, okay, I'll do something that's just a tad more normal.

  Nell Zink

  People, Normal, Okay

  "Subjects That Interest Most People". Interview with Amy Feltman, logger.believermag.com. July 20, 2015.

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• My early work is politically anarchist fiction, in that I was an anarchist for a long period of time. I'm not an anarchist any longer, because I've concluded that anarchism is an
  impractical ideal. Nowadays, I regard myself as a libertarian.

  Robert Anton Wilson

  Long, Fiction, Libertarian

  "Robert Anton Wilson: Searching For Cosmic Intelligence". Interview with Jeffrey Elliot, 1980.

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• Whatever I've experienced in my life is a part of my story, and I'm proud of that. But it's someone who wakes up early, works all day, believes in charitable work, business-minded, diligent, accountable, problem-solving... I'm so much about school, consistency and tradition.

  Drew Barrymore

  Believe, School, Charitable Work

  "Drew Welcomes Second Daughter" by Lauren Milligan, www.vogue.co.uk. April 23, 2014.

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• Rockefeller once explained the secret of success. 'Get up early, work late - and strike oil.'

  Joey Adams

  Success, Congratulations, Oil

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• The world that seemed so various and new, well, it does contract. One's burning desire to investigate human behavior, and to make, or imply, statements about it, does fall off. And so one does find that early works are full of energy and also full of vulgarity, crudity, and incompetence, and later works are more carefully finished, and in that sense better literary products. But . . . there's often a freshness that is missing in later works--for every gain there's a loss. I think it evens out in that way.

  Kingsley Amis

  Fall, Loss, Thinking

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• I suppose some people find their voice later than others, but it's interesting to look back at really early work to see that there's some kernel or a Rosetta Stone, in a way.

  Joe Bradley

  Voice, People, Interesting

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I actually never knew Peter Green but I do respect his early work very much.

  Ken Hensley

  Green, Peter

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• Bob Dylan may be the Charlie Chaplin of rock n' roll. Both men are regarded as geniuses by their entire audience. Both were proclaimed revolutionaries for their early work and subjected to exhaustive attack when later works were thought to be inferior. Both developed their art without so much as a nodding glance toward their peers.

  Jon Landau

  Art, Men, Rocks

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• Once an organization loses its spirit of pioneering and rests on its early work, its progress stops.

  Thomas J. Watson

  Organization, Progress, Spirit

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• I don’t go back and look at my early work, because the last time I did, many years ago, it left me cringing. If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.

  Lorrie Moore

  Writing, Years, Creating

  Interview with Angela Pneuman, www.believermag.com. October, 2005.

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