Bill Buford Quotes
What is New York? A straightforward answer: seven million people crushed onto an island originally settled by the Dutch. But it's more than that. These are seven million who were, mainly, not even born here.
Quotes to Explore
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People tweet before they think, and it becomes obsessive.
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Readers want to have the confidence that you understand the era in which the book is set, so for 'The Perfumer's Secret,' I needed to know everything about the First World War from a French perspective. I had to understand those people and that town in 1914.
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The 'Islam vs. the West' dialogue ceased to be about real people a long time ago.
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Some people's personalities are so compelling that they command attention.
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The priesthood is a marriage. People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years without realizing that love must change into some other love which is so unlike it that it can hardly be recognized as love at all.
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One may walk over the highest mountain one step at a time.
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The entertainment medium of film is particularly tuned to the present imaginations of people at large. A lot of fiction is intensely nostalgic.
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Caring about policy is important - people in washington forget.
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To my mind, there is no doubt that this Gandhi age is the dark age of India. It is an age in which people, instead of looking for their ideals in the future, are returning to antiquity.
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Creativity is generating ideas that are novel and useful. I define originals as people who go beyond dreaming up the ideas and take initiative to make their visions a reality.
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Normally, most writers don't say, 'I'm going into a mild hypnotic trance.' Typically, they don't know how they do it. Most people, when they have a good experience writing, they're well placed in that state, which is also sometimes called a 'flow state.' If you don't have trouble, you don't have to think about it.
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Some people like just sitting down and being taken for a ride. That's a beautiful thing that fiction can do. But it's not the only thing. In television and film, people are ready to accept any kind of jump cut, but the slightest disturbance on the page ruffles their feathers.
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I'm a national security liberal, which I tell people because it's meant to sound absurd.
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Redlining went beyond FHA-backed loans and spread to the entire mortgage industry, which was already rife with racism, excluding black people from most legitimate means of obtaining a mortgage.
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I think people underestimate the importance of lighting - layers of lighting, not just one light. I do a lighting seminar where I take a $300-a-yard fabric and a $3-a-yard fabric. I show what lighting can do to either one.
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You need people around you that care about you and are thinking about you in your best interest. And keep your mind straight.
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See, I believe that it is not true that different races and nations are alike. I'm profoundly convinced that that's a total lie. I think people are different. Sardinians, for example, have stubby little fingers. Bosnians have short necks.
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Specialists are people who always repeat the same mistakes.
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The film camera's ability to physically move through space, not zoom through space - every time we have a video camera the movement is through zoom; every time we have a film camera it is a physical movement.
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I embrace everything.
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Listen to any cantor, any good hazan, sing and you can hear a little bit of Ray Charles going on.
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Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and I found that out when I was Attorney General in Massachusetts.
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I like to describe myself as a proudly visible member of the most invisible segments of our society - older women.
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What is New York? A straightforward answer: seven million people crushed onto an island originally settled by the Dutch. But it's more than that. These are seven million who were, mainly, not even born here.
