Chris Abani Quotes
I think a book that is over 400 pages should be split in two. I don't know that there's anything that interesting that can go on for 700 pages. I think that is a little bit indulgent.
Quotes to Explore
-
Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.
-
I definitely go with the flow because I feel like I have been so lucky, and so many things have happened to me that just never should have happened.
-
It's quite rare that you find models taken care of backstage.
-
Most of the people who act and sing do so for their own pleasure and that of their friends and family.
-
Creating things sometimes is difficult.
-
I've been watching 'The Cosby Show' and 'Roseanne' a lot right now, and those work so well because they're not, like, jokey comedies; they are coming from real characters. We want our show to be like that. A family show.
-
I was always kind of florid. And full of rhetoric. That was my flaw. My whole time writing, I've had to work against that because it can be a wrecking posture.
-
Why not a space flower? Why do we always expect metal ships?
-
Maybe it will be a great thing when the Baby Boomers finally die out. In real life, it's not a matter of the good guys or the bad guys. Rather, it's big numbers and small numbers that do the counting.
-
A lot happens in 20 years.
-
I love the color pink. It makes a bold statement.
-
I've always kind of been an in-the-moment kind of person. I don't think that far in advance or have any idea what's around the next corner.
-
Foreign politicians don't have resources - or limited resources. It's useless dealing with them.
-
If you only believe that you're an artist when you have a big advance in your pocket and a single coming out, I would say that's quite soulless. You have to have a sense of your own greatness and your own ability from a very deep place inside you. I am the one with the litmus test in my hands of what people need to hear next.
-
Small lending institutions lack the capability of their larger counterparts to hire the additional manpower necessary to deal with the hundreds of additional regulations created by Dodd-Frank.
-
I used to play the trombone and the trumpet, which I still have, but I haven't picked up for a long time.
-
We're not trying to reinvent the wheel; for any environmental organization to claim sole responsibility for any kind of victory is insane, because everybody attacks these problems as a group.
-
Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.
-
I used to love ninja movies. That was my thing.
-
I think, in this country, we have a problem where we view the arts as charity, and therefore, it has no value. Things in America that have value are profitable, and unless you are profitable, we don't know where to put you.
-
It was this desire for a feeling of importance that led an uneducated, poverty-stricken grocery clerk to study some law books he found in the bottom of a barrel of household plunder that he had bought for fifty cents. You have probably heard of this grocery clerk. His name was Lincoln.
-
I think being raised within a Mexican Catholic family made magical realism a very natural part of who I am as a person and as a writer. My parents always told us great stories that often had magical elements and roots within Mexican folklore. Also, I remember my father reading a book to me, when I was very young, about the lives of saints. Those were crazy scary stories! Maybe he was trying to scare me into being a good person. In the end, magical realism offers me untethered freedom to explore human frailty and the way we clumsily cobble together our lives on this strange planet.
-
I think a book that is over 400 pages should be split in two. I don't know that there's anything that interesting that can go on for 700 pages. I think that is a little bit indulgent.
