Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Harry Potter to me is a bore. His talent arrives as a gift; he's chosen. Who can identify with that? But Hermione - she's working harder than anyone, she's half outsider, right? Half Muggle. She shouldn't be there at all. It's so unfair that Harry's the star of the books, given how hard she worked to get her powers.
I'm for legalizing marijuana. Why pick on those drugs? Valium is legal. You just go to a doctor and get it and overdose on it - what's the difference? Prozac, all that stuff, so why not marijuana? Who cares? It's something that grows out of the ground - why not? Go smoke a head of cabbage. I don't care what you smoke.
It's hard to make something that's interesting. It's really, really hard. It's like a law of nature, a law of aerodynamics, that anything that's written or anything that's created wants to be mediocre. The natural state of all writing is mediocrity... So what it takes to make anything more than mediocre is such an act of will.
I've never stopped being Argentine, and I've never wanted to. I feel very proud of being Argentine, even though I left there. I've been clear about this since I was very young, and I never wanted to change. Barcelona is my home because both the club and the people here have given me everything, but I won't stop being Argentine.
The radio is good for taking somebody else's experience and making you understand what it would be like. Because when you don't see someone, but you hear them talking - and, uh, that is what radio is all about - it's like when someone is talking from the heart. Everything about it conspires to take you into somebody else's world.
Semiotics is really interested in the questions like, what keeps you watching something, what keeps you - you know, what keeps you listening to a story on the radio? Like, what keeps you turning the pages in a book? What's the pleasure of it that's moving you forward, that's pulling you in and grabbing you and pulling you forward?
If I were doing a real rock show, slapping the phone book in time to the music, grooving with the songs, then it would matter to know how I felt about what I was playing. You can't fake it in that situation. But I'm just counting them down as they appear on the chart, 1 through 40. What really matters is what I say between the songs.
Men in their teenage years and even into their mid to late 20s, they're just baboons. They're really not capable of taking account of other people's feelings, being considerate, being intimate. They are essentially high on this drug of testosterone and they have very little experience and intellect. And that's a terrible combination.
The only meaningful contact is one that involves a genuine, giving personal interaction. You may want another person to help you in business, but you must also be willing to help him and to spend time getting to know his interests and needs... It has to be real and heartfelt, or it's best not to try to establish the relationship at all.
One of the things I learned as a young semiotics nerd was that if you have plot moving forward, no matter how banal the facts of it, simply the fact that the plot is rolling forward makes you wonder what's going to happen next, which creates suspense. So you can control peoples' attention simply by having things move forward in a story.
When I was a bad writer, I would consciously imitate other NPR writers who I thought were wonderful. I suppose that everyone's artistic practice is different. But I collaborate and sometimes don't agree at all with my collaborators' opinions. It forces you to understand why you don't agree with something: what's the fight you're picking.
The TiVo is really an amazing machine. Like everyone who has one, I totally recommend it. Just as everyone who's married will tell you to get married, and everyone who has a baby tells you to have a baby, everyone who owns a TiVo will tell you to get a TiVo, and they'll say things like 'Your life will be completely different.' It's true.
In this system called America, white privilege reigns supreme but to me, I have to embrace what I am and how special we are as a people. I have to know that God put me here for a real reason and He blessed me with divine privilege and there's a divine system that I can tap into that can help me overcome any obstacle that stands in my way.
I don't like that whole "art should challenge you" thing. Because I don't feel like art actually does challenge you. I was a semiotics major at Brown, and there's this idea that stories are better, books are better, and movies are better if they cocked you off your axis and you were completely disoriented and you'd really have to rethink everything.
A preacher was operated on for a hernia. As this was about the time of the first world war he was given ether. As he was coming out of the anesthetic a fire broke out in the building next door. As the flames began to show through the hospital windows the nurse pulled the shades down. She didn't want the preacher to think his operation had been a failure.
One of two things when the guy you're dating isn't really ready to commit. He's an a**hole and he's cheating on you; bottom line he's an immoral dude. Or, he's too young. And the advice I give to everybody night in and night out is: Don't ever take seriously, don't ever consider, don't even pay any attention to what a man says or does until he gets to about 30.
I remember clearly that when I was little it was explained to me [that] the way that babies were made was that God put the baby into some lady's stomach, right? And, at some point, I learned how it really happened, and really that was the beginning of the end of my belief in God. Up until that point, it had always been a really weird act of intervention on God's part.
A traveling show visited a country town and one of the acts was advertised as a striptease. A small boy begged his mother for a quarter to buy a ticket, but the mother refused, telling her son that if he went to that show he would see something awful. Well, the boy sneaked in the show and the first thing he saw was something awful - his own dad sitting on the front row.
We as black have to remind ourselves that we are a great people and we come from a great lineage. How can we say that we were Kings and Queens during ancient civilization but then turn around and say, 'we don't have privilege.' Who said that? What is that based on? Is that based on the white man's definition of privilege and what this system is showing us? Yes, of course.
It's about being in a race with time - just having a strong sense of mortality, and the idea of, How much time do you have left? How do you want to spend it? What I always come up with is: keep on writing, keep on working. But you can become sterile. It's become a matter of trying to find inspiration someplace outside of my own head, which I've been using exclusively for too long.
Those of us that get to a certain level, we have to start giving back to our communities, giving information it's something that you have to do. It's either realize that you're a great individual by nature and move towards that or just accept the white man telling you: 'you're never going to prosper, this world isn't meant for you to prosper, we have privilege, you don't, that's it.'
What really made me want to get involved in politics was seeing the rise of the antichrist Donald Trump. I started to see how he was energizing the country, but he was energizing the country in total opposite ways than Barack did. He wasn't bringing people together; he was literally tearing people apart. He literally wants to build a wall while I feel like Barack Obama's rise actually built bridges.
I see no reason in morality, why literature should not have as one of its intentions the arousing of thoughts of lust. It is one of the effects, perhaps one of the functions of literature to arouse desire, and I can discover no grounds for saying that sexual pleasure should not be among the objects of desire which literature presents to us, along with heroism, virtue, peace, death, food, wisdom, God, etc.
Some of the things that I do, I think are very important and much more important than the radio show or the television show that I do or anything else that I do. I think right at the top of the list is the basic thing. And of course the basic thing is to hopefully stop people from killing anything. And to create a non-violent diet for themselves, because a non-violent world has roots in a non-violent diet.
A poor old man held the winning ticket on a half million dollar lottery. Hearing the old man might be surprised at the shock, the local pastor was asked to break the news gradually. The pastor made a customary call, and while visiting casually asked the old man what he would do with a half million dollars if he had it. The old man replied, "why, I'd give half of it to you." Whereupon the pastor dropped dead.
I was specifically referring to the regular everyday people that you come across on your come up. You never know if that intern that you disrespected might end up being the CEO of the company one day, you honestly never know who's who. It's easy to treat the stars and the executives with respect but how do you treat the security guards or the waiter that serves your food? You may have to cross that bridge later.
We have to be a democracy and demand certain things even after that individual gets in the White House. All those promises those dudes and women are making on the campaign trail, we gotta make sure those promises come to fruition and that doesn't happen by just voting and letting them get in and then falling back. Nah, you gotta be active. You gotta make your voice heard and be constantly involved in what's going on.
I remember reading a book called, "From Niggas To Gods, Part One" by Andre Akil; the book was so easy to read, it was in capital letters with exclamation marks because Akil was screaming at us. It was about getting out of the mindset that this system has put you in. This mindset that makes you feel like your circumstances are permanent and wherever you're born is where you're going to end up. You have to realize who you are.
When I went to the University of Iowa in order to be a writer, I thought, This is the worst way to learn how to write. To sit in a room with a bunch of would-be writers, who want to write the Great American Novel, every one of them, and you read their stories and they read yours, and you're not living a life. I don't like that. I like learning on the job. The character of my work has definitely evolved from the character of my life.
I think that's what we don't understand as human beings is this is America. It's a democracy. Once we get whoever we want into the White House, even the person we want to get in the White House doesn't get in the White House. We have every right to not only criticize that person but demand that person does what it is we need to get done. That just happens with us mobilizing and us using our voices to talk to the mayors, the governors and the presidents.
When you talk about "white privilege", you're talking about something systemic. When you're talking about "black privilege" it's something spiritual because we as black people tap into a divine system that a lot of other cultures and races can't tap into and that system allows us to prosper in spite of everything that's been thrown our way from slavery to segregation to mass incarceration. We have a privilege pre-ordained by God that nothing and no one can stop.
I don't think any religion makes any sense and I think people who are into that are really getting duped, and I don't think Judaism makes any more sense than Christianity, and I don't think Christianity makes any more sense than Scientology. But here's a guy, L. Ron Hubbard, who told all his friends, 'Look, I'm gonna start a religion, 'cause I can't make any money as a science fiction writer.' I mean, he admitted that publicly! At least with Jesus Christ, you can't go talk to the guy.
You have to start looking in the mirror and saying, 'this is who I am, this is what I am and this is how I'm going to be' and start demanding more from yourself. In spite of everything that this system has thrown at us, we still have to live at the end of the day. We still have to find purpose and find ways to prosper and make a profit so you have to find ways to stand on your own two feet and fulfill your potential as a black man or black woman on this planet no matter how marginalized or oppressed you may be.
What nobody tells people who are beginners… is that all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, and it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not… your taste is why your work disappoints you… We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this… It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.
Man... is an inextricable tangle of culture and biology. And not being simple, he is not simply good; he has... a kind of hell within him from which rise everlastingly the impulses which threaten his civilization. He has the faculty of imagining for himself more in the way of pleasure and satisfaction than he can possibly achieve. Everything that he gains he pays for in more than equal coin; compromise and the compounding with defeat constitute his best way of getting through the world. His best qualities are the result of a struggle whose outcome is tragic. Yet he is a creature of love.