David Quammen Quotes
I was a prodigy who learned how difficult writing was only after getting published. I paid my dues later.
Quotes to Explore
-
When I was about four, people used to walk up to my mom and say I should be in commercials.
-
One can never know enough. The unknown and its call lies even in what we know.
-
I'm the complete opposite of every clean cut, decent-looking guy you could ever think of. Yet, I have the biggest heart in the world.
-
Let me just say as one who has been speaker of the House, I've had to have a very thick skin about every kind of thing that was thrown at me.
-
In truth, opinion may be taken for understanding; understanding cannot be taken for opinion. How so? Surely because opinion may be deceived; understanding cannot be. If it could, it would not be understanding but opinion. For true understanding has not only certain truth, but the knowledge of truth.
-
Banks are concerned the central bank is imposing too many regulations. If the trend continues, we'll swing to heavy regulation. We need to have balanced regulation to encourage the economy.
-
While girls average a healthy five hours a week on video games, boys average 13. The problem? The brain chemistry of video games stimulates feel-good dopamine that builds motivation to win in a fantasy while starving the parts of the brain focused on real-world motivation.
-
I'm a hybrid, and I kind of like that. Raised by African parents, growing up I lived between Burkina Faso and Stains, a suburb just outside of Paris. In Stains, I had all the cultures in the world on my doorstep, and that opens up your mind.
-
As a woman, I've learned that having a uniform of your staples or setting your look and saying what distinguishes you - like red lips or hair or whatever - leaves so much time for the rest of the day.
-
It was a small provincial place with great people and I had a happy childhood growing up in Queens.
-
How can we educators claim credit for understanding, let alone teaching, the 'global mind' without a single course on the impact of religion on every day life?
-
'Wicked' gave us a story that 'The Wizard of Oz' did not. Two sides to every story.
-
I don't need fame and I don't need power and I don't need wealth. I'm in need of friends, which I have found in abundance.
-
When I was writing my dissertation, I wrote about Freud and the process of sublimation, which is when you learn to stop breast-feeding, or stop going to the toilet whenever you want to. It's about learning to repress a desire for instant gratification.
-
I stayed away from mathematics not so much because I knew it would be hard work as because of the amount of time I knew it would take, hours spent in a field where I was not a natural.
-
I don't think of myself as a role model. I do try to live in a compassionate, considerate and positive way. The only advice I can offer is to find what you love to do, find the joy in it, and express yourself through your passion.
-
Let me tell you that I love the United States.
-
There is inspiration all around us.
-
I've always been more afraid of being left alone or left out than of things that go bump in the night.
-
Burroughs called his greatest novel 'Naked Lunch,' by which he meant it's what you see on the end of a fork. Telling the truth. It's very difficult to do that in fiction because the whole process of writing fiction is a process of sidestepping the truth. I think he got very close to it, in his way, and I hope I've done the same in mine.
-
I think writing is an extension of a childhood habit - the habit of entertaining oneself by taking interesting bits of reality and building upon them.
-
I am a person beset with fears, and one of my fears is that this thing that I will be writing for five years won't work. And the likelihood, of course, is that it won't - and that's fine.
-
I don't consider this hard work. I love it, and I think I get to make a difference. I really believe in Secretary Clinton, and I want to feel like I'm part of making a difference; I really do.
-
I was a prodigy who learned how difficult writing was only after getting published. I paid my dues later.
