James Weldon Johnson Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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Success must never be measured by how much money you have.
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Every story I write adds to me a little, changes me a little, forces me to reexamine an attitude or belief, causes me to research and learn, helps me to understand people and grow.
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Whenever you have dynamic interactions between 300 million people and the American economy acting in really complex ways, that introduces a degree of almost chaos theory to the system, in a literal sense.
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I have new ideas every day, and I always want to take on new challenges.
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Ben Franklin may have discovered electricity- but it is the man who invented the meter who made the money.
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Underground people pay a desperate toll finding out things nobody else has discovered yet. We run around like headless chickens looking for the next cultural fix to spiral around in before it gets appropriated somewhere else and becomes something it never was. There's this sort of one-upmanship in the underground.
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My Aunt Marsha ruled the family with a rod of iron. She was one wicked, mean woman.
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Most of my instruments are handmade.
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It doesn't interest me to be Harrison Ford. It interests me to be Mike Pomeroy and Indiana Jones and Jack Ryan. I don't want to be in the Harrison Ford business. I take what I do seriously, but I don't take myself seriously.
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I am writing something which I find satisfying and which I am prepared to put my name to as a composer.
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You have to respect your parents. They are giving you an at-bat. If you're an entrepreneur and go into the family business, you want to grow fast. Patience is important. But respect the other party... My dad and I pulled it off because we really respect each other.
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You can call Hanson a whole lot of things, but hip-hop isn't one of them.
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There was very little suicide among the men of the North, because every man considered it his duty to get killed, not to kill himself; and to kill himself would have seemed cowardly, as implying fear of being killed by others.
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As you get older, you can suffer from painful hips, and our joints wear a lot quicker than for people of average height.
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When I sing a set, people will say, 'I love 'Mayday.' People just love 'Mayday' so much. I love it too.
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I consider the guitar a tool for the most part. I do pick up the acoustic now and then, I certainly don't have any routine. Usually the only time I practice is when the band gets together. Hendrix has always been one of my favorite players, but I was a sucker for Nugent in the late 1970's.
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Qualifying for the Olympic Games was one of those moments where you just cry because it was like you've climbed Mount Everest.
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If a novelist tells you something she knows or thinks, and you believe her, that is not because either of you think she is God, but because she is doing her work - as a novelist.
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I calmed myself by walking into my nearby bookstore and marveling at all the books other people had written. So many people had finished and published novels; it couldn’t be so hard, right?
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Picabia is a very old painter who some people try to connect me to, but I refuse such comparisons very well.
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One thing I love about being back is English rain. Looking out of the window now, it's raining, and the sky is dark; I love it. To me, those are reassuringly English things. I love it when it rains.
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It was 1953, and I was still at school. I'd borrowed a silent French film from the library for my 9.5mm projector. It was by Jean Epstein, and it was awful. So I rang the library and asked if they had anything else. They said they had 'Napoleon Bonaparte and the French Revolution.'
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As yet, the Negroes themselves do not fully appreciate these old slave songs.
