James Fenton Quotes
For poets today or in any age, the choice is not between freedom on the one hand and abstruse French forms on the other. The choice is between the nullity and vanity of our first efforts, and the developing of a sense of idiom, form, structure, metre, rhythm, line - all the fundamental characteristics of this verbal art.
Quotes to Explore
-
I'm a compulsive reader of fiction. I fell in love with novels when I was a teenager. My wife Marilyn and I... our initial friendship began because we are both readers. I've gone to sleep almost every night of my life after having read in a novel for 30 or 40 minutes. I'm a great reader of fiction and much less so of non-fiction.
-
I love a real-life, movie moment in living color.
-
Biggie was a lyrical genius: he was a musical painter with words. As he rapped, you would see the picture come to life as you heard his story. You hear a lot of rappers rap; you hear a lot of singers sing, but you don't see the movie in your head the way you do when you hear Biggie rap.
-
Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.
-
I have a general sense of mission, and I intuitively know when something is influencing that mission. I think this is what I'm supposed to be doing. Doors keep opening. In the end, it's the best use of my skills. I've finally consented to the idea that I'm an artist.
-
I'm here today because I hated everything else.
-
I could live very quietly, do advertising to earn money.
-
The old movie stars like Bogart, James Cagney, Jimmy Stewart, they weren't this gorgeous, striking six-foot man who's rippled with muscles.
-
It's totally mistaken to suppose that an armed escort is going to give a journalist any protection - on the contrary, journalists who turn up surrounded by armed personnel are just turning themselves into targets and in even worse danger.
-
I have no ties to my dad. I had no communications with him; it didn't shape who I am or anything like that. I'm actually a product of my mom.
-
When I was immobilized by fear, I might have a panic attack. I've had a couple of panic attacks in my life.
-
I was not really as good as I should have been.
-
As a young woman, I wanted nothing more than to see my name in lights.
-
I'm not the biggest Miley Cyrus fan. I'm not the risque type.
-
Who co-founded Google? Sergey Brin, a Russian-born Jew whose family fled anti-semitism in the Soviet Union to settle here and who considers himself a refugee.
-
My whole thing is feel free to hate me – I so don't care if you hate me, but meet me, and listen to my record, and know me before you hate me.
-
Life isn't easy, and leadership is harder still.
-
Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.
-
The authorized biographers - the ones hand-picked to write the sanitized version of a subject's life - sit up front with the swells while the unauthorized biographer who writes without access or approval gets elbowed to the back of the bus.
-
Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.
-
But never in all her human days had her blood bubbled with such a golden exultation and such blissful freedom as now when she ran, a werewolf, across the marsh.
-
Sometimes when you film, you can be in a bit of a bubble, and then suddenly when you finish filming, it's taken out of your hands - it's not yours anymore, and we all love it so much that we feel quite protective of it.
-
For poets today or in any age, the choice is not between freedom on the one hand and abstruse French forms on the other. The choice is between the nullity and vanity of our first efforts, and the developing of a sense of idiom, form, structure, metre, rhythm, line - all the fundamental characteristics of this verbal art.
