James Fenton Quotes
I've not been a prolific poet, and it always seemed to me to be a bad idea to feel that you had to produce in order to get... credits. Production of a collection of poems every three years or every five years, or whatever, looks good, on paper. But it might not be good; it might be writing on a kind of automatic pilot.
Quotes to Explore
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Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.
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The most important thing is to preserve the world we live in. Unless people understand and learn about our world, habitats, and animals, they won't understand that if we don't protect those habitats, we'll eventually destroy ourselves.
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I need a hobby, and I don't want it to be basketball. I want it to be music. So to get away from music, I do other music.
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What's interesting about Stephen Baldwin is that me and Dana Gould were originally cast for 'Bio-Dome' – but Pauly Shore and Baldwin ended up doing it. So there's a little movie trivia for ya.
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There are a lot of films that are drug dramas, and we didn't want to tell Scarface again.
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I like bangers and really testosterone-fueled stuff.
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The whole gun debate needs to be infused with a discussion about manhood. It's frustrating to hear debates about gun rights vs. gun control, and yet very few people say what's hidden in plain sight: It's really a contest of meanings about manhood.
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A lot of West Virginia is untouched. It doesn't have as many strip malls, it has these old towns that feel like it used to be how it looked. Charleston has this river that runs through it, and it's really beautiful.
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Because I was a dancer, I started going to auditions for musical theater, which forced me to sing.
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The main purpose of life is to live rightly, think rightly, act rightly. The soul must languish when we give all our thought to the body.
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I can be very hard on myself, very demanding.
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If Dana White can offer a contract that's not one-sided, and it's not cumbersome to the point where we look at it and realize that we can't fight for him, then we'll fight in the UFC.
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I'm not usually attracted to big-budget American films.
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If you have spent any time with Barack Obama, you know he's a funny guy. He's a good guy. He knows sports.
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The greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change his future by merely changing his attitude.
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My grandpa would come in with water and flick it on our faces at 6 A.M. and be like, 'If you don't get up to feed the horses, you don't get to ride them.' We'd get up.
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In this culture, where entertainers and athletes wield such power, it seems only right to me that they try to make their influence a good one.
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We are not a country that subscribes to policing any part of the world. The areas we are comfortable with are capacity building, intelligence sharing, exchange of ships, call on each other's ports, joint training and exercises.
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Personality maintains its discreetness by an act of will. Otherwise one person will flow helplessly into another.
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Posts of honor are evermore posts of danger and of care.
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So much of writing isn't the fun parts like we get to discuss. It is sitting there putting the words down.
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Having a mustache and never smiling became a permanent component of my persona through the quaintly self-important decade of the seventies.
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When I came back from my first TED, very few people knew what it was. But around the time I was sitting down to write 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette,' in 2010, TED was exploding.
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I've not been a prolific poet, and it always seemed to me to be a bad idea to feel that you had to produce in order to get... credits. Production of a collection of poems every three years or every five years, or whatever, looks good, on paper. But it might not be good; it might be writing on a kind of automatic pilot.
