Quotes on Things

I think what we should do as historians is understand. And we can have our own views about how things turned out, but I think, in making judgements, we're getting into tricky territory.

Throughout my life, I was always the youngest to do things, which added hype that I didn't want. It added this pressure that I needed to do well fast.

That's my hunger. If I start to relax, and I lose that, then I had better stop my football. I need that hunger. I still feel I need to do things 10 times better than other players. Just to be accepted and to improve myself.

Things that appear on the front page of the newspaper as 'fact' are far more dangerous than the games played by a novelist, and can lead to wars.

Life is about having a good time, and it was a good time. We did some things well and some things poorly, but that was always the case.

The Tao teaches us not to intervene and interfere. The things we love we have to learn to leave alone. And the people we love we have to learn to let them be.

People are composed of many things, and in my work, what influences me is the complexity of people - the chiaroscuro of dark and light. When I play a strong guy, I try to find, where is he weak? And, conversely, when I play a weak guy, where is he strong?

The child often sees only what he already knows. He projects the whole of his verbal thought into things. He sees mountains as built by men, rivers as dug out with spades, the sun and moon as following us on our walks.

Things that came before, people and things and experiences - that does mean something to me. It doesn't mean I don't embrace the new, but I don't forget the past, either.

I was born on a plantation, and things weren't so good. We didn't have any money. I never thought of the word 'poor' 'til I got to be a man, but when you live in a house that you can always peek out of and see what kind of day it is, you're not doing so well. And your rest room is not inside the house.

I read. I order books from the States. I literally go into bookstores, close my eyes, and take things off the shelf. If I don't like the book after a bit, I don't finish it. But I like to be surprised.

There's no pleasure in working if you don't do the things you want to do.

I don't like to make strong statements. I want to write strong novels... I keep my deep, radical things for my novels.

Ideas are cheap. Always be passionate about ideas and communicating those ideas and discoveries to others in the things you make.

Generally, we use light to illuminate other things. I like the thingness, the materiality of light itself. So it feels like it's occupying the space, making a plane, being something that was there, not just passing through. Because light is just passing through. I make these spaces that seem to arrest it for our perception.

I stand with all the athletes who believe in doing things right. The ones who win and the ones who lose while knowing they have been cheated out of their positions. There are thousands if not tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of those kinds of athletes out there. We have to remember them.

I'd done all the things I thought a person had to do in order to be successful and fulfilled, like getting a great education and becoming a lawyer, and yet there was zero spark in my life. But there was no light-bulb moment. It was gradual. In the early 1990s, I decided to experiment and try some new ways of living.

Many faux pas of fashion can be avoided if you curb your instinctive desire to buy things with your heart instead of your head.

Modernity means overabundance. We are living in the age of mass-produced objects, things that come without announcing themselves and end up on our tables, on our walls. We use them - most of us don't even notice them - and then they vanish without fanfare.

It dawned on me that comics were not an intrinsically limited medium. There was a tremendous amount of things you could do in comics that you couldn't do in other art forms - but no one was doing it. I figured if I'd make a try at it, I'd at least be a footnote in history.

Teenagers are in some ways the best readers because their imaginations haven't been narrowed down by boring things like jobs and the realities of money and capitalism.