Interesting Quotes - Page 20

• I've talked to a few writers who have had childhood illnesses. The sense of convalescence - the feeling that you're waiting to become a real person - is quite an interesting thing. You're seeing all of your friends doing amazing things and you're just there, in a void, feeling a bit stupid. I wouldn't be able to say what I'd have been like without it, but maybe I'd be incredibly high-powered and successful. It also forced me to spend most of my time in my imagination.

  Evie Wyld

  Real, Stupid, Successful

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I do music mainly just for myself in the beginning, and of course it's great when I get a reaction, but I'm more interested in hearing something unusual to my ears, and that's what I'm also looking for in other people's music. It's not interesting to look for a sound that is made to make everyone on the planet move - I wanna have both, I want something danceable but very creative and unusual.

  Erik Wiegand

  Moving, Creative, Unusual

  Source: thequietus.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think comedy allows people to accept the more difficult parts of history. And history, if it's presented wrong, is just very depressing, particularly the history of slavery. If slavery is presented properly, it's a great story. But I think that within the commercial world of storytelling in which I live, there haven't been many strong works that discuss slavery in ways that are palatable and funny and interesting to the reader.

  James McBride

  Depressing, Strong, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Did the nineteenth-century novelists create more generously than we do now? In a general reading of contemporary work, do you see a lot of new and different characters, or is it the same character who is a stand-in for the writer? And it's interesting enough, but it's a weakness I think. We are much more self-revealing and less able to produce new people over and over again.

  Lore Segal

  Reading, Character, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• We believe we're seeing, in other animals, a process, or an attribute, that isn't fundamentally different from what we see in humans, so it seems to us to be spurious to call them different things. Now there are aspects of human culture that we don't find in animals, and that's really interesting, but there are also probably aspects of animal cultures that we don't find in humans, and that's really interesting.

  Hal Whitehead

  Believe, Animal, Different

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Humans are particularly interesting; our culture is incredible, there's no doubt about that. In many respects, no other species matches ours. But in quite a few respects, they do, and that can help us, perhaps, to better understand our own culture. We look at the ways humans are similar to other animals, and at the ways they differ, rather than just saying, "We have culture and you don't."

  Hal Whitehead

  Animal, Doubt, Culture

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Clearly there are some things about WikiLeaks... the material is in part very interesting although none of it is a real game-changer. I think if I was an American I'd be rather proud that American diplomats are quite assiduous in the way that they chronicle issues. Of course the impact has been that the whole culture of sharing is going down the tube.

  Misha Glenny

  Real, Thinking, Culture

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I know a few women younger than me who have careers and children, and so the burgeoning career and family happen at the same time. A few have said something like, "During dating, he was all about feminism. But now I have to ask him to help with the children, I have to ask him to do the dishes, and every time he does, it's like a favor. Where's the feminist I married?" That's theoretical feminism, not practical feminism. I don't think we're all where we need to be. I don't know if we will be in my lifetime. Life is imperfect. But interesting.

  Debra Monroe

  Children, Thinking, Dating

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• It's more interesting when people overcome inner turbulence, but at the same time I do like the innocent. Have you ever read The Idiot? I think Dostoyevsky created a brilliant character there. He doesn't have any self-inflicted wounds. I love that. People don't like him because he's so pure.

  Josh Hartnett

  Character, Thinking, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• There's something interesting about being really intimate and familiar with Israel, but still being American - that really thin piece of glass between me and my experiences.

  Molly Antopol

  Being Real, Intimate, Familiar

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I'm often a little perplexed, when I read a review of a book, by the quotes that are pulled out as evidence of excellent prose. I don't think great novels are necessarily composed of great prose, or that there's a correlation between beautiful prose and the quality of a work of fiction. A really good, interesting novel will often let a little ugliness get into its words - to create a certain effect, to leave the reader with a certain sense of disorientation.

  Katie Kitamura

  Beautiful, Book, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I don't speak any languages well enough to make an expert assessment on writing in translation, but since I'm interested in awkwardness in prose, I find I like the way translated texts can sometimes acquire awkwardness in the process of translation. There's a discordance translation can create which I think is sometimes seen as a weakness but which I think can be a really interesting aspect of the text.

  Katie Kitamura

  Writing, Thinking, Weakness

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Translated literature can be fascinating. There's something so intriguing about reading the text second hand - a piece of prose that has already been through an extra filter, another consciousness, in the guise of the translator. Some of my favorite writers who have written in English were doing so without English being their first language, so there's a sense of distance or of distortion there, too. Conrad. Nabokov. These writers were employing English in interesting ways.

  Katie Kitamura

  Distance, Reading, Literature

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I met a retired police detective. And he said to me that the interesting thing about heatwaves, from a police perspective, is that the number of people who just walk out of their lives when the weather gets unbearable is astronomic. He said the police prepare themselves for it - for a huge rise in the instances of missing persons. People choose to disappear when it's hot. It was fascinating.

  Maggie O'Farrell

  Perspective, People, Missing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I don't think school reform should be motivated by missionary zeal. I think it should be motivated by evidence of what works. I have been critical of Teach For America in the past but I think one of the things about their model that's interesting is that they're constantly looking at it and whether what they're doing works and reassessing their model, and making changes. So to the extent that I believe everyone in the education sector should be looking at evidence, reassessing, making tweaks to figure out what works, I think it's a positive model.

  Dana Goldstein

  Believe, School, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• We're obviously not a platinum-selling band, and yet we've managed to maintain a career on a major label through all this time, and I think we always felt like we were, to a certain degree, infiltrators there. And it's been an interesting thing. It's all been like a big art project for us.

  Lee Ranaldo

  Art, Thinking

  Source: pitchfork.com

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• We're at an interesting phase of Asian and Asian-American writing, where we might succeed in having readers look at us as creative individuals who write with fury and fire about the world, and in new ways, without having them say things like "I read a really good Indian book," or "That Malaysian fellow writes very well." So I hope by identifying as Indian I can get people who don't usually read "ethnic" or "Indian" literature to read that literature and enjoy it.

  Karan Mahajan

  Book, Writing, People

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I really feel actors should try and do as much diverse work as possible to try and keep it interesting.

  Cillian Murphy

  Trying, Diverse

  Source: film.avclub.com

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Using one style would be very boring to me. I love to play with all kind of images and combinations because it makes the results a lot more interesting and entertaining.

  Laura Restrepo

  Style, Kind, Boring

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• A writer writes a book. People read it. You don't know what they're reading, really. You read a review and think, "That is so inaccurate. You can't have been reading my book with any kind of attention, because that is all wrong, that's even the wrong name you're including there." But these reviewers have been diminished in importance, the work is so little respected. If you're reviewed by a real critic, by James Wood or Louis Menand, then you get something that is informed, interesting, and highly articulate. But the average review doesn't have that kind of depth anymore.

  James Salter

  Real, Reading, Book

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• It's always an interesting question of what was it like as Norman Mailer's son because I could easily turn it back and say what's it like not to. I didn't always realize my dad was Norman Mailer. I always knew he was Dad, and then I forget the exact age when it dawned on me that, you know, he is actually someone who affects the public consciousness of the time. It was amazing. I mean he was a rock star and brilliant and kind and funny and generous and scary when he needed to be and, you know, hard as a father.

  John Buffalo Mailer

  Dad, Father, Mean

  Source: bigthink.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I need to have one foot inside and one foot outside a culture to be able to write about it. For example, I couldn't write about the gay culture if I were wholly inside or outside of it. Finding that distance is always interesting. I jokingly say that when I'm in America, I write about Beirut, and when I'm in Beirut, I write about America. A lot of my friends in Beirut think I'm more American than Lebanese. Here, my friends think of me more as Lebanese.

  Rabih Alameddine

  Distance, Writing, Gay

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• It's true, there aren't many explicit references to Canada in my book. And not many explicit references to the U.S., either. I try to fill my poems with enough real, observed detail that the poems create a believable world - but I don't write poems for the sake of telling my own story. My life is not important or interesting enough to warrant that kind of documentary. Instead I try to use my experience as a way of understanding situations that are common to many people. I want readers to project their own lives onto my poems.

  James Arthur

  Real, Book, Writing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The ways in which theological constructs pose questions about what it is to be a human being on this earth are deeply elegant and deeply interesting to me. I may not always agree with the answers religion offers, but I take great interest in the questions it poses.

  Ayana Mathis

  Earth, Theological, Agree

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• My upbringing was pretty interesting. It was a rigorous, intellectual upbringing, but with the idea that we were a part of an important and legitimate enterprise. What that meant was sitting around the dinner table from a really early age with people from all different backgrounds who believed in God. When I was reporting in the wake of September 11th in Iraq and elsewhere, I felt I had the capacity to talk to people whose beliefs might sound outlandish to more secular journalists. I felt like I could be a translator between those two worlds.

  Eliza Griswold

  People, September 11, Intellectual

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source