Mark Billingham Quotes
Ian Rankin's Rebus is the king of modern British crime fiction. He is dour, determined, and constantly falls foul of his seniors. For all this, we root for him. He is eminently loveable, a quixotic hero moving through the darker half of a Jekyll and Hyde Edinburgh.
Quotes to Explore
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Your ability to use the principle of autosuggestion will depend, very largely, upon your capacity to concentrate upon a given desire until that desire becomes a burning obsession.
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I felt audiences are happier to take comedy people who play darker people because there's a link between the psychosis of comedy and the psychosis of being a twisted character.
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To me, doing a gay pride show is one of the most fun things. My first show that paid more than $10,000 was in a gay club on New Year's Eve in San Francisco.
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When you argue with your inferiors, you convince them of only one thing: they are as clever as you.
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It's just a theory really, but I have always thought that your physical surroundings can shape your voice and personality.
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Kids have a weird honesty, especially in their reaction to things where a lot of older people who have matured have lost that.
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It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn't a global Islam.
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When you read a book, you are letting another person distract your thoughts and work your emotions. If they are adept, there's nothing better than turning off and getting lost.
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This bill is the legislative equivalent of crack. It yields a short-term high but does long-term damage to the system and it's expensive to boot.
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I sure am handsome. I can't lie. This is one handsome guy.
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People may get tired of hearing from me, but I don't think I'll ever run out of things that I want to write about.
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More and more people are finally realizing that in the heart of America, there's all this incredible music that wasn't widely heard before because it wasn't in the interest of those who feel they have to control the taste of the wider public.
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I love New York, and I'm drawn to a certain intensity of life, but I've just never felt like I want to escape from the Midwest. A writer lives a great deal in his own head, and so one intuitively finds places where your head is more clear. New York for me is one of those places.
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It's my job, too, to keep up with pop culture and what the kids are into 'cause you don't want to sound like an old man trying to write for kids. I spend a lot of my time spying on them.
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Actors aren't all the same. They have very different skills. There are actors of intellect who are very thoughtful about everything they do... and then there are actors of instinct who don't know what they're doing until the cameras roll... My father was actually quite thoughtful about what he did, while my mother was much more instinctual.
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Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.
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You can go out in a good movie and look bad as well.
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If your business is really easy to do, don't gloat. You might be out of a job soon.
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There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power.
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The lion is most handsome when looking for food.
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De Niro was a hero of mine. And Sean Penn. But I've realized I can't operate at that level of intensity. That's okay for movies. On TV, when you live with horror day in and day out, you have to protect yourself.
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My dad was a real man's man, and so were my brothers, in a small town where hockey is king. It's a masculine culture. It made me really attentive to what it meant to be a guy.
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I also remember a line from a song by Smog [Bill Callahan], which seems to describe the experience of a town-dweller moving to the country: "I was raised in a pit of snakes/Blink your eyes - I was raised on cake."
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Ian Rankin's Rebus is the king of modern British crime fiction. He is dour, determined, and constantly falls foul of his seniors. For all this, we root for him. He is eminently loveable, a quixotic hero moving through the darker half of a Jekyll and Hyde Edinburgh.
