Binyavanga Wainaina Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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I love working with other actors and other people - you know, stand-up - it's lonely; it's just you out there and the audience. But it's fun working with other actors. I love doing that, too.
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It's a luxury to not have to just be performing with other people to have my music heard.
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People tweet before they think, and it becomes obsessive.
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We need to find the courage to say no to the things and people that are not serving us if we want to rediscover ourselves and live our lives with authenticity.
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Nobody's life is a bed of roses. We all have crosses to bear, and we all just do our best. I would never claim to have the worst situation. There are many widows, and many people dying of AIDS, many people killed in Lebanon, people starving all over the planet. So we have to count our lucky stars.
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I like talking one-on-one to everyone. I find it really sort of cathartic and interesting to hear people's opinions.
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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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People will turn their noses up at a sequel or that type of thing, but Pixar really works hard - if they're making a sequel - to make a sequel an original movie, to make it an original story.
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It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other.
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I think, initially, working on your own is really great because it allows you to just be really free and not worry about how things are perceived or if people are going to think you're an idiot. And once that becomes ingrained, at least for me, I think I'll feel really comfortable to work with other people and still feel that same freedom.
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I have laughter dates with myself, where I find comics on YouTube and watch them. Louis C.K. was my first laughter date a couple years ago. I'll also watch those videos of people doing idiotic things. That cracks me up.
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I realise I have inadvertently become a source of inspiration and hope for people in India simply by the fact that I grew up there, went to my local university, but could go on to do well internationally.
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I want to be an inspirational model. I want people to look at me and say, 'Wow, she looks healthy.'
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Contrary to all the blather we here about the unique goodness of the American people or our religious heritage or anything else, the one thing that set this country apart from all others was the Bill of Rights.
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Politics is the one field you don't age out of.
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I motivate what I see in young people because we employ about forty thousand young people in our various Chick-fil-A units. Some of them come to work because they need to work; others just work because they just like to work. There's nothing wrong with that.
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But I have been in some very beautiful churches, then I've looked outside and seen people starving to death.
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It's so inspiring to be around other people who have ideas you haven't thought of, and all of a sudden you're like, 'Wow! That's so amazing!' I definitely want everything I do to just get better and better.
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It doesn't work that way, you know, because most parts that you think you'd do well, most other people don't. So they offer you something - The Avengers is a good example... I fitted into that because I came from that sort of background. It's not even acting.
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A dialogue among civilizations can be seen as a dialogue between the individual and the universal.
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It’s very important to be able to accept things, you know. Gracious acceptance is an art – an art which most of never bother to cultivate. We think that we have to learn how to give, but we forget about accepting things, which can be much harder than giving.
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I think it's that thing of growing up all the time watching American movies and listening to American music. It hits you in a way that's a lot purer because you are not in that culture that you're watching.
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So here’s a really stupid thing about the world: The trick to looking cool is not caring whether you look cool. So the moment you achieve perfect coolness is simultaneously the moment that you actually, completely don’t care. I didn’t care about the gravitas of that TV show, and the freedom and security and confidence that came with that was a rush. It took me a while to realize that the feeling I was feeling was power.
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People reach an age... where somebody else's platform is no longer yours.
