Stephen Spender (Sir Stephen Harold Spender) Quotes
If you get to a certain age, all people want to know about you is people you knew. ...An American student once said to me, you know, isn't it extraordinary that I am alive and you're not dead.
Quotes to Explore
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There's never really been a real hood Christmas movie.
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If a film is a huge hit, you do think properly before choosing your next projects.
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I have this really high priority on happiness and finding something to be happy about.
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The music of the Clovers and Spaniels and the rest was like candy to me. I couldn't get enough; my teachers probably thought I had attention deficit disorder.
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Bringing an end to mass government surveillance needs to be a central pillar of returning to the principles we have put in jeopardy in the early 21st century.
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I don't come from a famous family and don't have this detachment from everyday people and everyday life. I'm just doing my job and the attention that comes with it is part of the territory.
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What I've discovered and really confirmed to myself is that opera really likes loud colours, and you need something bold, something savage, unpredictable, passionate. You can't really run a two-hour opera round some muted murmuring.
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And we lost a lot because of that, and I think this is future gymnastics to separate ages. Because kids can do it more than adult. A woman and adult woman can show more than the small kids.
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I think that fiction writers can write about anyone. If you are writing a character, and the only thing they are to you is their otherness, then you haven't written a character.
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Every time the liberals pass a bill - I don't care what it involves - they stick criminal sanctions on it. They don't feel there is any way people are going to keep a law unless they can put them in jail.
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More than a billion people use the Internet, yet only a tiny fraction contribute their knowledge to it.
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Beulah, Peel me a grape.
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We are not to call for tyranny and bans on freedom. It is obvious that we cannot stop publication of what we view as indecent in our sacred faith...failing to make use of Western freedom of press and other technologies to show the West the values of Islam is intellectual failure and a guilt that should not be linked to Islam.
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The history of human civilisation is a history of mutual borrowings.
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Something different happens to my brain when I put pen to paper: the pace of writing or drawing slows you down and gives you more time for thoughts to come in.
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My own thinking has evolved. You find Africanisms in American speech. You find an African influence on United States culture. There are all kinds of Africanisms in America, as you would expect, if you really thought about it... That whole thing is much broader; the influence is much broader than I first understood.
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If the United States commits to the goal of reaching Mars, it will almost certainly do so in reaction to the progress of other nations - as was the case with NASA, the Apollo program, and the project that became the International Space Station.
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I think cancer is a hard battle to fight alone or with another person at your side, but I will say having someone to pick you up when you fall, stand by your side through every appointment and delivery of bad news, is priceless.
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The humor section is the last place an author wants to be. They put your stuff next to collections of Cathy cartoons.
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China should be developing through the various foreign investments it receives. I hope for its level-headed and rational understanding that anything to discourage that is a disservice to itself.
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A good culture in a hospital can absorb and manage a few bad nurses, but once the culture becomes bad in itself, bad nursing practice is much harder to hide.
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A house with any kind of age will have dozens of stories to tell. I suppose if a novelist could live long enough, one could base an entire oeuvre on the lives that weave in and out of an antique house.
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If you get to a certain age, all people want to know about you is people you knew. ...An American student once said to me, you know, isn't it extraordinary that I am alive and you're not dead.
