Francis Alys Quotes
Can that make any sense - a Belgian artist living in Mexico and working in Afghanistan?
Quotes to Explore
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We do not celebrate people who have made success out of serious hard work.
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Like the Elizabeth I play, Queen Elizabeth is a monarch who actually moves with the times. She gets new information, assimilates it, and changes in order the fit in with the way the world is moving. I admire that.
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Istanbul is a vast place. There are very conservative neighbourhoods, there are places that are upper class, Westernised, consuming Western culture.
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It's a special place, and I believe in the prominence of America, and having America be and continue to be an exceptional place, and making no apologies for America being a superpower.
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Pop culture, it's crazy. There's all this violence in video games. In 'Call of Duty,' people are literally just blowing other people up. Hey, let's protect your country from your couch while eating your sandwich.
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As people do better, they start voting like Republicans - unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing.
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I had this dream that I was going to come to New York and be a writer.
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'The Larry Sanders Show,' it's actually about love, which would sound like a paradox at first. But if that love didn't exist, the darker attitudes would not play. You would have a one-dimensional, cynical show, which I don't think the show was.
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Fiorello LaGuardia saved City Center. The real man saved it, and he made this building into a performing arts venue.
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I regard myself as a beautiful musical instrument, and my role is to contribute that instrument to scripts worthy of it.
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I always fall in love with qualities of people I work with.
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I really love having conversations and deconstructing things. I don't mind not having a laugh every second. Sometimes things deserve a little more discussion, and then you can have some fun after that.
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After my tour I had time to stay at home, be with my boyfriend and hang out with friends and that brought me down to earth and helped me write music from a more relaxed place.
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If I still lived in Russia, I'd be dead... or a really effective oligarch.
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I'm trying to go with the flow, which is not what I used to do. I used to try to micromanage my career choices.
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If you see with innocent eyes, everything is divine.
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My ideas are always better. We have an understanding in place.
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It was the 'Gaucho' album that finished us off. We had pursued an idea beyond the point where it was practical. That album took about two years, and we were working on it all of that time - all these endless tracking sessions involving different musicians. It took forever, and it was a very painful process.
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We absolutely need to reform the Congressional budget-writing process.
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I'm constitutionally incapable of working on planes or trains, and airports are definitely out.
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The most dangerous thing I've ever encountered was a run-in with Boko Haram around 2007 in a small town in Nigeria. I got caught along with the photographer I was working with, the same one I worked with on the Afghanistan book, Seamus Murphy. We were caught in an attack by a mob after Friday prayers. And the level of violence was so extreme. It was more violent than any other mob violence I have ever seen.
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My filmmaking really began with technology. It began through technology, not through telling stories, because my 8mm movie camera was the way into whatever I decided to do.
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Can that make any sense - a Belgian artist living in Mexico and working in Afghanistan?
