John Ridley Quotes
For children, diversity needs to be real and not merely relegated to learning the names of the usual suspects during Black History Month or enjoying south-of-the-border cuisine on Cinco de Mayo. It means talking to and spending time with kids not like them so that they may discover those kids are in fact just like them.
Quotes to Explore
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Burroughs called his greatest novel 'Naked Lunch,' by which he meant it's what you see on the end of a fork. Telling the truth. It's very difficult to do that in fiction because the whole process of writing fiction is a process of sidestepping the truth. I think he got very close to it, in his way, and I hope I've done the same in mine.
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I have changed so much as an actor over the years.
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It's very hard to teach someone how to write a song if to begin with there's no creative crop to harvest.
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I've always liked working really hard and then doing nothing in particular. So, consequently, I didn't overexpose myself; I guess I maintained a kind of mystery. I wasn't ambitious.
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I hate a man who always says 'yes' to me. When I say 'no' I like a man who also says 'no.'
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I have learnt that I am me, that I can do the things that, as one might put it, me can do, but I cannot do the things that me would like to do.
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My parents could not be more Italian.
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I write in English because I was raised in the States and educated in this language.
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One of the things I took from my wartime experiences was that reality was a stage set... the comfortable day-to-day life, school, the home where one lives and all the rest of it... could be dismantled overnight.
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There is something in humility which strangely exalts the heart.
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I had a passport where I wrote 'artist' under 'occupation' and I remember thinking, 'That's it, it's proved!'
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You don't need to raise taxes on rich people, because they create capitalization and investment. But you need to tax speculation - meaning capital gains.
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The grandeur of Jerusalem is also... its problem.
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If you calculate 15 minutes a day to shave, that is 5,000 minutes a year spent shaving.
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Happiness is a mysterious concept. It seems to work best as futurity: at that point I will be happy, et cetera. I feel like I experience small pieces of joy day to day.
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The people of Iran have had to endure repressive laws that have stifled their freedom of speech and religion for too long.
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Back in the '70s - I remember the '70s: we were told there was global cooling. And everyone was told global cooling was a really big problem. And then that faded.
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What I'm very concerned about is how do we bolster our self-awareness as humans, as biological organisms?
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The real work of an actor goes on inside, and I don't think it changes from director to director - I always go for broke! But I don't get a lot of direction, unfortunately.
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Every time I write a song I feel really lucky and kind of surprised. Not surprised that I wrote it, but just surprised that things exist that you don't know about.
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Nothing in our evolutionary history specifically prepared us to live in large societies. Almost everything about the way culture works does.
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In every literate society, learning to read is something of an initiation, a ritualized passage out of a state of dependency and rudimentary communication.
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For children, diversity needs to be real and not merely relegated to learning the names of the usual suspects during Black History Month or enjoying south-of-the-border cuisine on Cinco de Mayo. It means talking to and spending time with kids not like them so that they may discover those kids are in fact just like them.
