S. Jay Olshansky Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material. And the fictional form was going to force you to do things with the material, to dramatize it in a certain way. I thought nonfiction gave one a chance to explore the world, the other world, the world that one didn't know fully.
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I never feel like there's any one point to the film, to anything, to any of the movies I've made.
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When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability... To be alive is to be vulnerable.
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In our local Baptist church, I sang in the choir and formed a gospel quartet. When our minister caught me messing with his guitar, he taught me three positions – one, four and five. After that, I taught myself to play.
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I try and sit on the fence because as soon as you voice any kind of opinion, people begin to think you're an idiot.
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No formal course in fiction-writing can equal a close and observant perusal of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe or Ambrose Bierce.
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My boys asked me to write beautiful letters for their ex-girls so they could get them back. I thought, 'I should be writing songs for myself.'
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Events tend to recur in cycles.
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I've never been tempted to do these hideous furniture shoes.
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'The Satanic Verses' was denied the ordinary life of a novel. It became something smaller and uglier: an insult.
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I'm looking to expand my portfolio while I'm on top and while I'm young.
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Peter Wagner, my son, just won the Bel-Air Junior Club Championship. Parred the last three holes. One-putts, up and down. Us Wagners don't hit greens. We chip and putt.
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My guilty pleasure is I like to watch a lot of HGTV. I really like watching design shows about houses, like extreme homes. Like buying a bridge and turning it into a house or something like that. I really am interested in home design or something like that... architecture.
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Before this distinguished assembly and the world, the bells today proclaim the joyous tidings of the completion of this quietly soaring tower.
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I like movies where you feel like it was actually thought through.
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There's this tendency to be like, 'Where's the negative stuff? How valid is the criticism?' But honestly, what people think of me is none of my business. If I live on the Internet looking for public approval, I'm going to be miserable.
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I do not like the idea that a Russian company cannot be successful without Western experience. I think that, at the end of the day, it is a question of bringing benchmarks from other countries. So far, the golden benchmark has been the West.
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Some people think that being in government for a long time is a bad thing. But the more you stay, the more you learn. I am now an expert in governance.
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Where can we find greater structural clarity than in the wooden buildings of old? Where else can we find such unity of material, construction and form? here, the wisdom of whole generations is stored.
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With chemical film, it was possible to alter photographs, but you had to be an expert. That's not true any more. The LA Times fired a photographer at the beginning of the Iraq War for editing two shots together. Photography is crumbling. Certainly it is for the newspapers a bit now, isn't it? There will be painting again, absolutely!
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One way to get high blood pressure is to go mountain climbing over molehills.
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The clearer you are about the consequences of your actions and the more intensely you desire to enjoy the consequences that your behaviors may lead to, the more motivated you will be.
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Death is a zero sum game for which there is no cure.
