Mark Leyner Quotes
When I started, I wanted to be thought of as tortured and seductive, not funny, but humor tends to be a reflexive part of a person's sensibility. It's an almost impossible thing to teach anyone, which leads me to believe that it's intuitive.
Quotes to Explore
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Going to bed can cause imaginary conversations you should have had with certain people or real conversations with your brother who is calling from a bar in a different time zone.
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One of the things jazz has always excelled at is translating the reality of the times through its musical prism.
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I fell in love with New York at some indeterminate point in my early years.
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I'd never written a novel before, and I wrote a novel, and that turned out OK.
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I don't like to take a lot of stuff since I'm really sensitive to medications.
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I like to know that when I'm 90 years old, I'm going to be able to look at a song or poem I wrote and say, 'Wow! I remember I was so crazy about this person,' or 'I remember what that day felt like.'
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I was a horrible athlete.
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If you look up the definition of news in the dictionary, it isn't what you watch on TV.
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I'm not well versed on the verbiage of the internet.
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Crime novels, it has been said, show the human psyche under pressure.
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The world is no longer against us.
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During the Cold War, the U.S. instituted a policy of sending money to governments in poor countries to buy their political loyalty. While studies show that sending aid to foreign governments creates allegiance, it does not lead to economic progress.
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'Are 'Friends' Electric?' was two songs: the verse part and the talking part. Two different songs I couldn't finish. One day I was playing the main verse part of 'Are 'Friends' Electric?' and after a few minutes I got frustrated, as normal, then started to play the other song, and realized they went together.
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Language usage always has a political context.
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Growing up, me and my brother, we were kind of exact opposites. We were completely yin and yang. He was more rough and tumble, and I just wanted to play with my girlfriends.
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The main thing that you have to remember on this journey is, just be nice to everyone and always smile.
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Good manners sometimes means simply putting up with other people's bad manners.
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The trick to being a novelist is to act like an iceberg. Make it seem as if you're displaying only one-tenth of what you know, and the other nine-tenths isn't visible and never mind if that part is pure styrofoam!
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Even people who say that black people are minorities, there are a billion black people in the world. A billion white people. What part of that is a minority? If you separate yourself, then maybe. But I see black people as one man. When I see people beaten on the streets of America, that hurts me. I feel that.
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We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.
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When you start digging into things like character, though, the notion that people have high character or low character is very strong. What's crazy is that my thinking is not a new insight. The very first large-scale study of character, still one of the largest ever, was done in the early 1900s by Hugh Hartshorne, an ordained minister and a scientist.
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Do I believe in giving up? No, I don't.
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As a creative person, you want to start with a blank canvas.
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When I started, I wanted to be thought of as tortured and seductive, not funny, but humor tends to be a reflexive part of a person's sensibility. It's an almost impossible thing to teach anyone, which leads me to believe that it's intuitive.
