Per Petterson Quotes
Some critics said, 'Hey, why are you writing historical novels?' I say they're not historical, they're contemporary, because people walking around who lived through this, even a little bit, they carry it inside. The contemporary isn't just what you can see now.
Quotes to Explore
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My concept of government's role in people's lives is that it is limited but legitimate, and essential when people have nowhere else to turn.
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People go to restaurants for so many different reasons. To court a girl, to make some deal. Maybe to talk to some lawyer about how to get an alimony settlement better than they got last week.
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I've had those people very interested in my writing. Since I think of myself as a composer, I feel really good. I've had lots of guys call me up. I've gotten two or three commissions to write things. I've written lots of movie scores.
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On a personal level, there are many people who have meant a great deal to me. My father and mother were certainly of vital importance, not only in themselves but because they created a world for me to revolt against.
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People say, 'Oh, politics is so polarized today,' and I'm thinking... '1861, that was polarized.'
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I'm not out there to be blocking shots or fighting guys. I'm out there to produce offensively.
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The Hindu nationalists see a religion near perfection save for the tampering of Muslims and Christians. So they fall upon these groups, rather than try to reform their own practices by drawing on India's sophisticated philosophical traditions.
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Here's my whole marketing idea: treat people the way you want to be treated.
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Tolerance, openness to argument, openness to self-doubt, willingness to see other people's points of view - these are very liberal and enlightened values that people are right to hold, but we can't allow them to delude us to the point where we can't recognise people who are needlessly perpetrating human misery.
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I do things, and other people laugh at them. I rarely know what the joke is supposed to be or why they're laughing.
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You have to understand that while I pre-plot the meta story of a given book, I often have no idea of what will happen on the next page, let alone the next chapter. That's what makes it fun for me; I write the books the same way many people read them.
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I'm not that involved in personal grooming. But I try not to be offensive to people.
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Some people seem to see compassion as being mushy.
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The big businesses are less willing to take risks. I talked to some young people in Hong Kong, and they said they are lost. Young people indeed have fewer opportunities than before. But is it true that there are no more opportunities for them? No!
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People give us credit only for what we ourselves believe.
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The reason why I meditate and pray in general is just to remind myself that it is not about me.
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Writing is a very lonely occupation. To write you need to concentrate, to concentrate you need to lock yourself away. No distractions; you want your stream of thought uninterrupted.
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The roar of the crowd when you come out for a final is like nothing else: when 15,000 people are cheering you, a lot of adrenaline goes right through you.
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I think the fashion industry has gotten to a place where it is embarrassing.
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Every day I try to be in communication with the universe in an unconscious way.
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Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setting, a writer creates places where previously invisible truths become visible. Or the storyteller posits a series of dots that the reader can connect.
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When you know you have 1,000 people sitting on the edge of their seats in silence because of a shift that just happened on stage, there is no better feeling.
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We'd like to have immediate answers to all of our questions. I think medicine in particular. I found it frustrating as a physician sometimes to not be able to tell someone exactly why something was happening to them. There are still so many mysteries in medicine.
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Some critics said, 'Hey, why are you writing historical novels?' I say they're not historical, they're contemporary, because people walking around who lived through this, even a little bit, they carry it inside. The contemporary isn't just what you can see now.
