Quotes on Anything

To feel not only submitted but willing to be anything or nothing as the Lord wills it - this is, in truth, to sing a song to our Well Beloved.

It all happened the way it was supposed to. I wouldn't change anything. I had such a great run.

I am a nonparticipant of social media. I'm not much attracted to anything that involves the willing forfeiture of privacy and the foregrounding of insignificance.

You're never the same after you run the Iditarod, and I still lust to go out and run with dogs, even though I know that I shouldn't. But I'd give just about anything to be able to do it again. To see the horizon again from the back of a dog team would be wonderful.

I notice that young men go to the universities in order to become doctors or philosophers or anything, so long as it is a title, and that many go in for those professions who are utterly unfit for them, while others who would be very competent are prevented by business or their daily cares, which keep them away from letters.

We cannot teach people anything; we can only help them discover it within themselves.

I just assumed the world was full of solo percussionists. I couldn't find sticks or music or anything where I was, but that was expected because there was nothing there anyway. And I think that was possibly the greatest asset for me, just not knowing.

News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. And it's only news until he's read it. After that it's dead.

The thing that I would say you get the most hate about on social media, in my experience, is if you tweet anything about women's rights or feminism. It blows my mind. But it's the thought of not being a feminist that actually blows my mind.

To die is as if one's eyes had been put out and one cannot see anything any more. Perhaps it is like being shut in a cellar. One is abandoned by all. They have slammed the door and are gone. One does not see anything and notices only the damp smell of putrefaction.

I don't think anything I've written has been done in under six or eight drafts. Usually it takes me a few years to write a book. 'World's Fair' was an exception. It seemed to be a particularly fluent book as it came. I did it in seven months. I think what happened in that case is that God gave me a bonus book.

I embarked on my life - I didn't do anything. I don't have an explanation.

I hated singing, I hated being on stage; I hated being in the Cranberries. I was constantly crying. I was going insane. I wanted to be a shopkeeper, a hairdresser, anything. I was so desperate to have a reality, friends, a regular, boring life. I missed that.

Any American who has spent time in Iraq or Afghanistan will tell you: the closer you get, the less certain you are of anything. If you are in Iraq, if you are in Afghanistan, everything is ambiguous. Everything is murky and gray and uncertain and possibly lethal.

In the plays - that's where I go crazy. But my prose has a much lighter touch; it's not trying to thrill with language, just to be more truthful. I'm not concerned with the accuracy of anything. We don't get to the truth of anything with facts.

My wife asked me once if I weren't a comedian what I would do. I couldn't answer the question. I never imagined doing anything else.

I want to live in a world where my son will not be presumed guilty the moment he is born, where a toy in his hand isn't mistaken for anything other than a toy.

My brother shaved a cricket bat out of a coconut branch... we played cricket with anything we put our hands on - a hard orange, a lime, a marble - anything we could use in the backyard or the streets.

For a long time, I thought when you do a box set, you're giving up; you're saying, 'OK, I don't have anything left.' But now I've listened to some of the old stuff I haven't heard in 20 to 40 years with fresh ears. It's like, 'Oh yeah, I can see where people might want to to hear some of this stuff that didn't make it onto the records.'

I find that my reading, particularly nonfiction, can inspire a poem as well as anything else.

It's very, very difficult to reinvent yourself when you're 40 or 50, whether you are a taxi driver who now needs to become a web designer, or anything else. It just becomes more difficult and more scary.