John Lanchester Quotes
In my view, a review should be like talking to a friend who's just asked you, 'What was it like?' You're giving a verdict on an experience, not trying for a definitive last judgment.
Quotes to Explore
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In the eyes of many people, giving doesn't count unless it's completely selfless. In reality, though, giving isn't sustainable when it's completely selfless.
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About the most exciting thing a baby can do is burp - I've spent hours of my life holding a baby on my shoulder and patting its back, trying to loosen up a burp. Burping was probably invented to give the father something positive to do, since our chests are not equipped to allow us to do much else.
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Every child needs to have for itself not only its loving parents and siblings and friends of its own age, but a grown-up friend.
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I know from my own experience that great films and great actors can have a really big influence on you. There is a place for art in the world, and if you're lucky enough to be good at something and to keep being given work, it's not such a bad thing.
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Altruism raises your mood because it raises your self-esteem, which increases happiness. Plus, giving to others gets you outside of yourself and distracts you from your problems.
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Self-esteem is a powerful force within each of us... Self-esteem is the experience that we are appropriate to life and to the requirements of life.
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College was where I got to actually experience the difference between black and white.
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I consider 'Dr. Horrible' a tremendous success. The fact that it won an Emmy I just think lends validity to what we were doing and the point we were trying to make: taking the power into someone else's hands and changing the world.
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My time at Shell was a most valuable experience because it taught me to look at the world in a long-term way. Shell takes a 20-year view on events and plans for different scenarios. It makes you see the world as a kind of large matrix.
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But it's the particularity of a place, the physical experience of being in a place, that makes it onto the page. That's why I don't just do library research. I very rarely write about somewhere I haven't been.
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I'm the one who often makes the 'Murder, She Wrote' reference, and ABC hates that, they don't want me to do that. And I say that having never actually watched 'Murder, She Wrote'. I think people have been trying to compare it to crime shows that are on right now, and all I can do is listen. I don't watch a lot of TV.
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Capitalism offers you freedom, but far from giving people freedom, it enslaves them.
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And while I might not always agree with the viewpoint I have to portray, because I play a district attorney, as an actress I can always tell myself that my character is trying to take the moral high ground.
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Real love is a permanently self-enlarging experience.
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Someone gives jewelry, and there's a bit of romance. If you buy it from a store, the store is trying to romance you. Even when I'm making the jewelry, I have to be romanced.
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There's something really unique about 'Orphan Black' is that it has a lot of female leads, so it's about a lot of women's stories, but it's not women's stories in terms of trying to find a guy or keep a guy; it's about entirely other things.
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A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.
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Right now I am trying to be in a place of calm, a place where I can chill out and then handle the chaos of life better. You don't just get it overnight; you have to work at it. It's a daily struggle.
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War is an arena for the display of courage and virtue. Or war is politics by other means. War is a quasi-mystical experience where you get in touch with the real. There are millions of narratives we impose to try to make sense of war.
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Music is my friend, it comforts me in joy and in sorrow.
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Everybody wants to be a star right now, to be heard, to have a voice, so you have to give the confidence for people to have that ability - and give them the wardrobe to become a star.
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My eyesight is not nearly as good. My hearing is probably going away. My memory is slipping too. But I'm still around.
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When you go to church you are really listening-in to the secret wireless from out friends: that is why the enemy is so anxious to prevent us from going. He does it by playing on our conceit and laziness and intellectual snobbery.
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In my view, a review should be like talking to a friend who's just asked you, 'What was it like?' You're giving a verdict on an experience, not trying for a definitive last judgment.
