Paul Johnson (Paul Bede Johnson) Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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I was brought up with beautiful music - Nat King Cole and Glen Miller from my dad, and my mum loved Judy Garland and Doris Day - brilliant stuff. Through my brothers and sisters I heard David Bowie and The Specials, The Carpenters, Meatloaf and The Rolling Stones.
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If you stop being scared, that's when entropy sets in, and you may as well go home.
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Summer is a promissory note signed in June, its long days spent and gone before you know it, and due to be repaid next January.
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The idea of going on tour for the rest of my life with old works is not that exciting. As an artist I definitely think the work in future is going to be better than the work in the past, otherwise why do it?
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I had decided that if I was going to be a singer, I had to earn it. I had to learn how to play an instrument.
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Writing is literally transformative. When we read, we are changed. When we write, we are changed. It's neurological. To me, this is a kind of magic.
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Perhaps no place in any community is so totally democratic as the town library. The only entrance requirement is interest.
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The most important thing as a leader is your relationship with God.
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Some people manage their writing by saying, 'I need to get 2,000 words written today,' others by saying, 'I will write for X hours.' Not me. I start with a plan for the book, break it down into scenes, and I know what scenes need to get written each day. If the scene takes more words than I thought, so be it.
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I got a scholarship to Seattle University and I was writing arrangements for singers and everybody. But the music course was too dry and I really wanted to get away from home.
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At the simplest level, economics can better show us the consequences of our actions. Less simple are cases in which we don't have the knowledge to predict the full consequences. Global warming and climate change are examples.
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I'm definitely not getting married. In this business, you're either getting married or they want you to be pregnant. I'm not getting married until I'm forty. If ever.
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Today's children are taught by our culture that we are a cosmic accident. Something slithered out of the primal slime and over billions of years evolved into a human being. We are cousins, ten times removed, to the ape at the zoo eating his own excrement.
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Love is a great emotion, but I believe it's not just about romance; it could be love for nature, people, for relationships.
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For a writer, published works are like fallen flowers, but the expected new work is like a calyx waiting to blossom.
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I was awfully curious to find out why I didn't go insane.
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Maybe when my kids are grown up, I can go back to Broadway. It would be great someday, I suppose.
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Religion has convinced us that there's something else entirely other than concerns about suffering. There's concerns about what God wants, there's concerns about what's going to happen in the afterlife.
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I love when you aren't accountable to anybody or anything, and you can just be wherever you are.
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A writer is defined by the language in which he writes, and I would stick to that definition.
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From the time, I have been in politics, your love has kept me going. All Gujaratis have all right on me, but you have now shared that right with the people of India.' 'It's the first poll in my political life when I didn't have political sabha in Ahmedabad.
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I traveled nonstop in 2009, so when my son popped out and my passport expired for a while, I felt more than happy just to be at home here in Canada.
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When one is the type of writer who cares about the meaning of the historically specific setting, the history itself is not something that I would call backdrop. It's not window dressing for a timeless relationship about love and betrayal. For me, the setting and the specific history are active co-agents with me in trying to form the novel.
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There are no inevitabilities in history.
