Explore Quotes on Has Beens

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.

There is a widespread difficulty in the Muslim world, which has to do with how the people are taught about examining their own history. A whole range of stuff has been placed off limits.

The field of the novel is very rich. If you're a composer, you're well aware of the history of composition, and you are trying to make your music part of that history. You're not ahistorical. In the same way, I think, if you write now, you are writing in the historical context of what the novel has been and what possibilities it has revealed.

I'm a reader of Chinese literature, I like their films, but also: I've had great difficulty getting my work published in China; very little of it has been published there. The first two attempts to have all of my work published, for instance, were refused without any reason ever being given.

I was very happy in Bombay. I was good at school. There was no reason to change anything. I suppose it must have been some spirit of adventure, of wanting to see the world.

You can't have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.

Writers have been in terrible situations and have yet managed to produce extraordinary work.

I have been a film buff all my life and believe that the finest cinema is fully the equal of the best novels.

I went to England in the '70s, and I was in my early 20s. There was still a residue of that era of being an underclass or colonial. I assume it must have been a more aggressive and prominent attitude 40 years before that, because Australia internationally wasn't regarded as having much cultural value. We were a country full of sheep and convicts.

Everyone has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put in every heart.

I've done a lot of films that all have been pretty edgy.

Try to open up your mind a little, and move away from rigid opinions of what people should do and be - unless you have been there.

For thousands of years, there have been lies about being gay or not being gay. If you know they're lies, you're free.

I deeply believe that if the Australian Labor Party, a party of which I have been a proud member for more than 30 years, is to have the best future for our nation, then it must change fundamentally its culture and to end the power of faceless men. Australia must be governed by the people, not by the factions.

FOR a long time the conviction has been dimly felt in the community that, without prejudice to existing institutions, the legal day of weekly rest might be employed to advantage for purposes affecting the general good.

Under Barack Obama, the only 'Change' is that 'Hope' has been hard to find. Now millions of Americans are insecure about their future. But instead of inspiring us by reminding us of what makes us special, he divides us against each other. He tells Americans they're worse off because others are better off. That people got rich by making others poor.

We've never been people that go around and confront people that have been financially successful and say, 'We hate you. We envy you because of how well you're doing.'

Democracy no longer means what it was meant to. It has been taken back into the workshop. Each of its institutions has been hollowed out, and it has been returned to us as a vehicle for the free market, of the corporations. For the corporations, by the corporations.

I am a Maoist sympathiser. I'm not a Maoist ideologue, because the communist movements in history have been just as destructive as capitalism.

Of all the subjects on this planet, I think my parents would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

The internet has been a boon and a curse for teenagers.