James Mattis Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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I write seven days a week, starting at 4 o'clock in the morning, including Christmas.
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My 50th birthday approaching felt like a big milestone to me. I've lived half a century. If I write about food and use my life as a fulcrum to move the story along, maybe I've lived long enough to fashion a narrative that has a happy ending.
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There is no investment you can make which will pay you so well as the effort to scatter sunshine and good cheer through your establishment.
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With TV, you get on a show and you're there for 11 years playing the same character. I would pull my hair out. Yes, the money is good. But I'm really not in this business to chase dollars.
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I make images from things I find serendipitously. I don't know what it is, but I know it when I see it. It could be from a newspaper, on the street. It could be something I fell over.
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There are still some terrible cliches in the presentation of Indian fiction. The lotus flower. The hennaed hands. In mainland Europe, people still slap these images on my books and I go bananas.
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The reason I was angry all the time was that Gloria Steinem and all those people, without reading my work, were saying all these horrible things against me.
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An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.
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That's what a good crime novelist - any good novelist - should do with you: play with your perceptions while showing you everything in plain sight.
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My doctor gave me six months to live, but when I couldn't pay the bill he gave me six months more.
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The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad.
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I think being able to really fall in love with someone is the craziest thing that could ever happen. You know, allowing yourself to really go there and really feel those things is extremely scary.
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The stability of what's called the Standard Model of particle physics and its ability to make so many clever predictions with immense precision suggests that we may just be stuck with it, and there may never be an overthrow of that.
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As the poet has expected, the alarms now are sounded, for - and it must be said again - the birth of a poet is always a threat to the existing cultural order, because he attempts to break through the circle of literary castes to reach the center.
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I wish I was one of those persnickety types who buys guidebooks and studies them, but I don't have the inclination or time. I'm more of a 'get on the plane, arrive at the destination and see what happens' kind of traveler.
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We would not think of allowing a man to determine a woman’s life merely because a fetus he helped create was in her womb; then why would we allow a woman to determine a man’s life merely because a fetus he helped create is in her womb?
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Wealth is a great sin in the eyes of God. Poverty is a great sin in the eyes of man.
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A man standing by a spring of clear, sweet water and cursing it. While the fresh water keeps on bubbling up. He can shovel mud into it, or dung, and the stream will carry it away, wash itself clean, remain unstained. (Hays translation)
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'What It Is' was based on this class I've been teaching for 10 years - I wanted to write a book about writing that didn't mention stuff like story structure, protagonists, and all those things that we know about only because they already exist in stories.
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Every major federal campaign-finance-reform effort since 1943 has attempted to treat corporations and unions equally. If a limit applied to corporations, it applied to unions; if unions could form PACs, corporations could too; and so on. DISCLOSE is the first major campaign-finance bill that has not taken this approach.
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When schemes are laid in advance, it is surprising how often the circumstances will fit in with them.
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Some will not look on suffering because it creates responsibility.
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For I shall learn from flower and leaf, That color every drop they hold, To change the lifeless wine of grief To living gold.
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You must reward the kind of behavior that you want.
