John Ashbery Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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I was thinking of going to London drama schools or to New York, because France didn't accommodate the things I wanted to do in film.
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I approach these people from a standpoint of love. How were they loved? How do they love? What's going on in their heart? There's that that I think about with every role.
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There ought to be more grants that go to people in their late twenties and early thirties. That's a crucial age, although it's very hard to judge who is worth supporting and who is not. Looking back on my own life, I see that was the period when I was closest to giving up as a novelist and when I most needed some encouragement.
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I'm too self-serious for a comedy.
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Poverty breeds lack of self-reliance.
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Wise choices can put us in control of situations where we might otherwise be tempted to compromise our principles. We cannot control all that happens to us; however, we can choose to be in control of our responses.
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Once every five hundred years or so, a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can't imagine ourselves living without.
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When you're young and queer and closeted, you can end up in this place where you regard your straight peers as the enemy.
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I have often heard that the novel is dead. But I see novels produced, I don't know how many a week, in France. I have the impression it's carrying along quite well.
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Thinking differently is my strength.
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I want to have a long career.
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A nation's economy is more than its markets, tastes, technologies and property rights.
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Part of the reason I sort of shot out like a cannon out of Michigan and left home at such an early age is because I had to feel independent.
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The test is to recognize the mistake, admit it and correct it. To have tried to do something and failed is vastly better than to have tried to do nothing and succeeded.
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'Wicked' gave us a story that 'The Wizard of Oz' did not. Two sides to every story.
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I heard what was said of the universe, heard it and heard it of several thousand years; it is middling well as far as it goes - but is that all?
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I'm constantly maxing out my Gmail account, and that is hard to do.
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And if you take the cameras out of the courtroom, then you hide, I think, a certain measure of truth from the public, and I think that's very important for the American public to know.
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When I pick my subcommittee chairmen, I look for people that understand what it's like to run successful businesses, who know what it's like to sign the front of the check instead of the back of the check: somebody that gets it.
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I just gotta keep reminding myself: Every time I do an interview or something, my volition really has to be just to serve, to help people. Not to feel like I'm important.
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There is all the difference in the world between departure from recognised rules by one who has learned to obey them, and neglect of them through want of training or want of skill or want of understanding. Before you can be eccentric you must know where the circle is.
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At the risk of sounding like a broken record: this is a far-right, militarist state. Such states tend to experience uprisings only when they have failed by militarist or nationalist standards, as the Argentinian junta did in 1982.
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I write with experiences in mind, but I don't write about them, I write out of them.
