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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I don't do meditation. That's not for me. It's not my thing.
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I gave it my body and mind, but I have kept my soul.
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Words are the supreme objects. They are minded things.
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A knife can be a symbol, but it also better be able to cut string. And if it represent cutting free, cutting loose, in the story’s beginning, it better not be used to prop up a bookcase and then forgotten later on.
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Even a billion people is too much. There's no way back to the simplicity we once knew, but there may be a way forward to the simplicity that we once knew.
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I write with experiences in mind, but I don't write about them, I write out of them.
