Binyavanga Wainaina Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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I get motivated by the fact people are following me, that they want a photo or say 'vamos' or 'Canelo.'
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I wanted to bring people together, and most importantly not feel threatened when they came to watch me box.
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Although China and United States are competitors, China and the United States are indeed partners in trade.
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I think I would make a good spy. I can sort of be a chameleon. People don't notice me very easily. I never get recognized.
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Writers always have confidence issues - it comes with the territory. We never know where we fit in, or what the actual value of our work might be. So we hit lulls, or slogs. Throw in the idea that many creative people are somewhat manic-depressive, and it can get pretty dark at times.
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I'm a liberal, but I'm not biased. Seriously.
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I think people have to set up little battles. They have to demonize people whom they disagree with or feel threatened by. But it's the ideological framing of the debate that scares me.
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I've never really felt like a veteran. I've never felt like the guy who's like, 'OK, everyone needs to look up to me and respect me.' I've always just been one of the guys that people are excited to get in the ring with. That's all I want.
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The thing I learned from 'Pride and Glory' is that people like to feel a little better leaving the theater than they did coming in.
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People have different takes on clothes and what to wear and colors and all that stuff, so why make a big deal about uniformity? It took me a long time to grasp that particular concept, simply because I was coming from the James Brown thing. Again, I wouldn't trade that experience for anything.
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I found that being with happy positive people annoys me.
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I always had a lot of fun in America, with much more freedom than if I had tried to cook in France. I wouldn't have the same motivation or inspiration, and I wouldn't have cooked for the same kind of people in France, so it wouldn't have given me this edge I had in America.
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I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.
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Square meals often make round people.
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Irish history having been forbidden in schools, has been, to a great extent, learned from Raftery's poems by the people of Mayo, where he was born, and of Galway, where he spent his later years.
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I think when you're looking for people to interview, you want to make it fair and honest. You're not just bringing people on so you can beat them up or, you know, make fools out of them or something.
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You go to Paris, or you go to Portugal, you go to Poland, and you ask, 'Who are you people?' They'll tell you, we're Portuguese, we're Spanish, we're Polish. Who are the people that are really European? The people in Brussels, in the E.U. bureaucracy. Europe has not been able to move to the level of patriotic identification with the concept.
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As an actor you can't build up proper relationships with the people you work with, because after six months, you're done.
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I find being Irish quite a wearing thing. It takes so much work because it is a social construction. People think you are going to be this, this, and this.
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If you first fortify yourself with the true knowledge of the Universal Self, and then live in the midst of wealth and worldliness, surely they will in no way affect you.
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Well, I think a lot of people just want to be famous.
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In the beginning when I sat next to Tom Brokaw on the 'Today' show, the stories I was interested in were those having to do with women and children and learning and health. In those days, 25 to 30 years ago, that was called soft news, and not in a nice way.
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Coupling doesn't always have to do with sex ... Two people holding each other up like flying buttresses. Two people depending on each other and babying each other and defending each other against the world outside. Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world.
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Every one, we, we homosexuals, are people, and we need our oxygen to breathe.
