Peter Temple Quotes

In writing, I'm totally anti-plans of any kind. All my attempts to plan and plot novels have come to grief, and in expensive ways.

Peter Temple

• Writing
• Grief

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Quotes to Explore

• 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.

  

  J. G. Ballard
  • Writing
  • Done
  • Truth

• In real life, I'm gorgeous, beautiful.

  

  Rachel Dratch
  • Life
  • Real
  • Beautiful

• I don't know what's on the other side.

  

  Patrick Swayze
  • Know
  • Side
  • Other

• The high point was that the people are really nice - despite the crazy politics - and I loved being there. The hardest part was knowing some of the things I was probably going to write about Texas would make those nice people very unhappy.

  

  Gail Collins
  • People
  • High
  • Nice

• Let me just say as one who has been speaker of the House, I've had to have a very thick skin about every kind of thing that was thrown at me.

  

  Nancy Pelosi
  • House
  • Me
  • Kind

• I have a 60-acre farm in North Carolina, and I have a tractor and a farmhouse. As soon as I groom the land, I want to put cabins around and have a place where people can write and hang out. It'll be either that or an all-black nudist colony.

  

  Zach Galifianakis
  • People
  • Want
  • Black

• Perhaps I'm particularly serious, because I'm not unaware of the potential absurdity of what I'm doing.

  

  Daniel Day-Lewis
  • Serious
  • Doing
  • Potential

• We need to make clear the federal government does not have authority to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens without due process or, for that matter, to use lethal force on U.S. citizens on U.S. soil if they don't pose imminent threats.

  

  Ted Cruz
  • Government
  • Process
  • Clear

• SAP is a great company, but they have their work cut out for them if they want to compete in databases.

  

  Safra A. Catz
  • Work
  • Great
  • Want

• There are no opportune times for a penalty, and this is not one of those times.

  

  Jack Youngblood
  • Times
  • Penalty
  • Those

• The best time to expand is when people are asleep at the wheel.

  

  Barbara Corcoran
  • People
  • Time
  • Best

• Every city is always changing, on its own trajectory.

  

  Olafur Eliasson
  • City
  • Always
  • Changing

• Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure.

  

  Edsger Dijkstra
  • Success
  • Failure
  • Luxury

• The one charm about marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.

  

  Oscar Wilde
  • Life
  • Marriage
  • Deception

• I beg you, don't use the verb, 'discover', I hate it. What does it mean, that I didn't exist before?

  

  Iman
  • You
  • Hate
  • Mean

• The Arab representatives and their followers were not interested in the persecuted millions throughout the world; they were fixed on a political agenda that distracted the world from their own serious shortcomings in the human-rights department.

  

  Jack Schwartz
  • World
  • Political
  • Serious

• I don't think of myself as a role model. I do try to live in a compassionate, considerate and positive way. The only advice I can offer is to find what you love to do, find the joy in it, and express yourself through your passion.

  

  Barry Williams
  • Live
  • Love
  • Passion

• I use to live on this street when I was a kid where there was an old person retirement home, and all of the old people would listen to that band Herman's Hermits, and they would wear white nursing shoes. And they would throw away stacks of VHS tapes, and I would go through the trash and take them.

  

  Harmony Korine
  • People
  • Live
  • Home

• Somehow we can't live outside the politics of race. There's something very deep in all of us, that is taught to us when we are very, very little. Which is the disrespect and fear of the other.

  

  Anna Deavere Smith
  • Live
  • Fear
  • Deep

• You take a number of small steps which you believe are right, thinking maybe tomorrow somebody will treat this as a dangerous provocation. And then you wait. If there is no reaction, you take another step: courage is only an accumulation of small steps.

  

  George Konrad
  • Believe
  • Thinking
  • Small

• There is a whole industry in America of people who want to write, and those who teach it. Even if the students don't end up writing, what's good about them taking the courses is, they become great readers, learning to appreciate the writing.

  

  Edmund White
  • People
  • Up
  • Good

• My passion is writing, but it is also a fight because I still see home as a woman's duty.

  

  Angeles Mastretta
  • Writing
  • Home
  • Passion

• I find it hard to think of myself as selling books. I don't even have a Web site. I want to sit and write, not sell.

  

  Stephen Carter
  • Writing
  • Book
  • Hard

• In writing, I'm totally anti-plans of any kind. All my attempts to plan and plot novels have come to grief, and in expensive ways.

  

  Peter Temple
  • Writing
  • Grief