John McGahern Quotes
Ireland is a peculiar society in the sense that it was a nineteenth century society up to about 1970 and then it almost bypassed the twentieth century.
Quotes to Explore
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A person that says, 'Losing is not difficult,' I don't even want to be around that person. And obviously, that person has never won anything relevant in their life.
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If al Qaeda or any other enemy of our country manages to create a situation or explode a bomb or murder or incapacitate large numbers of our people, we cannot wait for 7 weeks of a special election in order to deal with that.
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I think it's more important than ever to be as vocal as I can be about things I believe in outside of music.
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I shouldn't say this, but I always love the sidekicks. I want to do a leading-lady role in a film - absolutely. But I find that a lot of times I get attracted to the sidekick role. They stand out a little more because they're quirkier, they're funnier, they're crazier.
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In 'A Boy's Own Story' and 'Jack Holmes and His Friend,' my idea was to take someone totally different from my real self and, at the same time, to assign to him my own life trajectory.
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I get up late, have an espresso, and immediately start work. I try to get roughly caught up on email before I leave the house, then if I need to write anything or review a complex deal, I do that, and then I head to the office and work on my top few priorities for the day. I try to schedule my meetings in the afternoon.
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The politics of the Cape Town Metro, which allows an executive Mayoral committee to make secret decisions which affect you, behind closed doors, is wrong!
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I asked my parents for permission to study in America and they were so sure that I wouldn't get in and get a scholarship that they encouraged me to try. So I applied to Yale and got an excellent scholarship. I then worked for the Boston Consulting Group for six and half years.
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In 15 years we'll have all the sequence, a list of the genes everyone has in common and those that differ among people. We know only something like a tenth of 1 percent of the sequence at the moment.
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Passive fatalism can never be the role of a revolutionary party, like the Social Democracy.
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You can be socially accepted and tell the truth about what it is to be a woman.
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I learned that we can do anything, but we can't do everything... at least not at the same time. So think of your priorities not in terms of what activities you do, but when you do them. Timing is everything.
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My argument is simple, which is, that for several thousand years in Western civilization, marriage has been the union of one man and one woman. Research is overwhelming that children need mothers and fathers.
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But as I grew up as a child, falling in love with the theater and Shakespeare, my heroes were Sir Laurence Olivier and Sir John Gielgud.
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I think pulling off, pulling off a kind of fake documentary of me being a, you know, actual dictator would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible.
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I don't let anything kill my spirit.
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My 'Big Bang Theory' costar Johnny Galecki went off the grid. He bought a huge ranch and goes there every weekend. He keeps telling me to do the same thing, but I don't know if I'm that committed. The Valley is as far off the grid as I'm going to go.
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Since I became Secretary-General, five years ago, I have seen youth participate at the United Nations as never before.
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I grew up with a fascination with Marco Polo. I had this unlikely interest in the East as a young man, and you can't really read about Chinese history and philosophy without encountering him at every turn.
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There is a difference between a consumer - who passively receives the information that they are spoon fed - and a citizen - who engages with society, asks questions, does research, and works towards making a difference in their neighborhood, city, and country.
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Sometimes I see the world for how f-ked up it really is. I tell myself I'll be the one to make a change in it. I could die tonight; not make it to the sunrise, then I couldn't hear the pain in it.
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I first got involved with Mel Brooks through 'The Elephant Man.' Everybody knows now, but they didn't know at the time that he was the producer.
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I have a good friend who's a very good printer. And he does a certain amount of printing for me. I do all the developing. If somebody's going to goof my film, I'd better do it. I don't want to get that mad at anybody else.
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Ireland is a peculiar society in the sense that it was a nineteenth century society up to about 1970 and then it almost bypassed the twentieth century.
