Saul Steinberg Quotes
A beautiful woman can be painted as a totem only; not as a woman, but as a Madonna, a queen, a sphinx.
Quotes to Explore
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Whether or not we communicate it, I definitely seek my mom's acceptance and approval for everything. She has a strong commercial sense of movies and is a quintessential audience. When she doesn't like something, I know there is reason to worry. When she loves something, there is reason to celebrate.
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Since 9/11, there has been a huge leap in people wanting to get personally involved in public service and international affairs.
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I come bearing an olive branch in one hand, and the freedom fighter's gun in the other. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.
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President Obama's over in Indonesia when guys like me were at a paper route. President Obama, I don't know what experience he had at that same age when he was in Indonesia. So I think it's hard for him to grasp that America entrepreneurial spirit.
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I would love to have been around in the Keystone Studios days.
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I came to London. It had become the center of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost.
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Fiction is optimistic or unrealistic enough to demand that there should be a meaningful narrative.
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It is a great delusion in those whose understanding has been darkened by self-love, to think that there is any obedience in the subject who tries to draw the superior to what he wishes.
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If you're a competitive person, that stays with you. You don't stop. You always look over your shoulder.
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Sarcasm helps me overcome the harshness of the reality we live, eases the pain of scars and makes people smile.
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I have a tendency to think that when you portray baddies in movies, they come out more human than good guys.
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I actually started out as a poet in high school. I published in small literary magazines for probably about ten years. I entered the Yale Younger Poet contest every year, until I was too old to be a younger poet, and I never got more than a form rejection letter from them.
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Where there is righteousness in the heart, there is harmony in the house; when there is harmony in the house, there is order in the nation; when there is order in the nation, there is peace in the world.
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In a democratic age, you can't buck demography - except through civil war.
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The corporate right fires up the religious right against gay marriage and abortion and uses their votes to push their deregulation and tax cuts for the rich. It's an old trick. The House of Saud has the same arrangement with the Mullahs in Saudi Arabia.
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Al Qaeda has overplayed their hand. What the al Qaeda do when they go into a town or village or a neighborhood inside a major city is they get a stranglehold on the people themselves. They force the men to wear beards and the women to be properly costumed and essentially completely covered up.
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Sometimes, I think the best kind of poem is one in which there is an acute balance between what is humorous and that which is very serious. That balance is very hard to strike. But it can be done.
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To appear on the stage drunk, to have them leave there and remember me making drunken mistakes, that was death.
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I've known elephants with broken hearts, others with depression.
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My red patent-leather, 5-inch peep-toe slingbacks are not mere shoes. They are fine art. They make me feel tall. They make me feel sexy. They make me feel powerful. I call them my 'special-day shoes.'
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I don't outline. I sit down to write, and I take the ride. If something starts to not feel right, I go back to the last place that felt like jazz to me.
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Silence is a lie. Silence has a loud voice. It shouts, "Nothing important is happening - don't worry." So when something important IS going on, silence is a lie."
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I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was going on, whereas I, in my 20s, was reading everything. Everything seemed important. But they were only interested in the writers they admired when they were young, and I didn't understand it then, but now, now I understand it.
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A beautiful woman can be painted as a totem only; not as a woman, but as a Madonna, a queen, a sphinx.
