Jason Isbell Quotes
When somebody asks me what a song or a line is about, I feel like I'm not done writing it yet.
Quotes to Explore
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The only difference between a dead skunk lying in the road and a dead lawyer lying in the road is that there are skid marks around the skunk.
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The difference between a violin and a viola is that a viola burns longer.
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I've always made sequels, even when I was making Super 8 movies if the audience liked it.
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This little hobbit saves the world. The wizard kills the dragon and saves the town. So many people connect to that character; it doesn't matter if it's an elf or a hobbit or a dwarf. It doesn't matter. They're human in their heart and soul.
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And it was then that I realized wow, I'm able to write lyrics and sing and stuff like that.
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In any work you do, you can be profound one minute, and then you be superficial the next, and you can be smart and insightful and then insipid. There can be room for all that.
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I do two cups of coffee with a little bit of raw sugar and soy creamer, and then I do a bowl of plain oatmeal with walnuts and blueberries. Now, if I could do what I really wanted to do with my life, every morning I would have a salami-and-cheese omelet with hash browns and a buttermilk biscuit - and pancakes. But my heart would explode.
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The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity.
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Your mind is what makes everything else work.
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I had these experiences as a kid; I remember certain things happening in school that were horrifying that I would see, certain things of violence or certain things of cruelty, but around that, something might happen afterwards to cause everyone to laugh, and that always blew me away.
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The roundness of life's design may be a sign that there is a presence beyond ourselves.
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Albania is going through a deep crisis because it lacks the rule of law, an independent judiciary, and freedom of the media. I don't think if we stop protesting the problem is solved.
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People stayed with me and worked extra hard for me because I could see the potential in them – I'm not so sure they could see the potential in me.
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I wasn't a very good student in elementary school and had a hard time with reading and writing.
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People have given me the freedom and believe in me enough to say if I want to do these things that I will find a way to make it work. I don't know if they think I'm crazy, drug damaged or just an old weirdo.
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One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing. I did that with 'World's Fair,' as with all of them. The inventions of the book come as discoveries.
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I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them; most writers groups moonlight as support groups for the kind of people who think that writing is therapeutic. Writing is the exact opposite of therapy.
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You know, my mum's always encouraged me and never made my gender an issue, I guess. She brought me up to believe in equality, as opposed to feminism or sexism – so it just meant that my gender was not relevant to what I was capable of achieving.
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I'm coming to the end of my life. I do reflect on what I've done for the 85 years that I have been given so far. And I'm proud of what I've done.
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The notion that aid can alleviate systemic poverty, and has done so, is a myth. Millions in Africa are poorer today because of aid; misery and poverty have not ended but increased. Aid has been, and continues to be, an unmitigated political, economic, and humanitarian disaster for most parts of the developing world.
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The oppression of a majority by a minority, and the demoralization inevitably resulting from it, is a phenomenon that has always occupied me and has done so most particularly of late.
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It wasn't until I had been writing on and off for maybe ten years that I started to establish any kind of routine, thought I couldn't put a finger on an exact date, and this routine relates simply to the aphorism 'How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.'
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You know, I think when you are unemployed, especially for a long time, it's hard to be inspired or hopeful almost about anything. So it's tough, especially when there has been such gridlock here in D.C. You know, when we are fighting and can't get anything done, whether you are liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, no one wins.
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When somebody asks me what a song or a line is about, I feel like I'm not done writing it yet.
