James Clavell Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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I kind of lost interest in school. I was never really that interested anyway. I was never academic. I didn't really go to school as much as I should have.
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It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.
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For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it's essential to be free.
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It's very easy to have slogans and rhetoric that people will follow, but eventually the slogans fall away.
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I've met people who didn't even know there was a Calvin Klein; they thought it was just the name of a product.
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Excellence is not a skill, it's an attitude.
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Cinema gives you the opportunity to be both a grandparent and a grandchild whereas in life you cannot be both at the same time.
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Depth on different levels is so important to me. You look at a band like The Beatles, all their material has so much depth to it. And I want people to be able to run away with my melodies and get lost in them and take the lyrics and be able to relate to them.
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The best time to expand is when people are asleep at the wheel.
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Being an actor means asking people to look at you. I guess I accept that. But it's a profession in which the job is to show another world and other people. You may access it through bits of yourself, and your imagination and experience, but actually, in the end, you're not playing yourself.
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From the spinners, Anil and I have been together for a long time and I respect him a lot.
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I like not to feel that all my eggs are in one basket, or I get nervous.
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I think that, to be an artist, you have to have a big enough ego to believe that people out in the world want to see what you think is a good idea. And if you don't have that sense of ego, then the minute that idea goes into the world, self-doubt kicks in.
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I should like to know if, taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle, you begin making exceptions to it, where will you stop? If one man says it does not mean a Negro, why not another say it does not mean some other man?
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I pick my actors primarily based on my gut-feel. They could be rank newcomers or established stars, but if I feel they'll do justice to my characters, they are on. I think Bollywood is now looking towards Kollywood for new faces, and, to my mind, Suriya will be a very successful crossover star because he's very versatile.
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There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk.
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If you're not bruised up, then you're not doing an action film in a real way.
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Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new at all.
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I have found that the Way of the samurai is death. This means that when you are compelled to choose between life and death, you must quickly choose death.
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Just the fact that a thousand people in front of me were ready to hear me sing was one of the best feelings I can think of.
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What if it turns out that a life isn't defined by who you belong to, or where you came from, by what you wished for or whom you've lost, but instead by the moments you spend getting from each of these places to the next?
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Now I'm seen by more people in one episode than I was in 20 years of theatre and movies. It's gratifying to have an impact on 25 million people a night, but I can say goodbye to my lunch-pail life as a working actor. I'm scared I might be a celebrity.
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What are clouds, but an excuse for the sky? What is life, but an escape from death?
