Mac Barnett Quotes
I read The Stinky Cheese Man as an adult. I missed that book when I was a kid. I grew up mostly with books bought at yard sales, picture books from the fifties to 1975, which is really a lucky thing.
Quotes to Explore
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As a songwriter, pop music really is a love and a joy and a science, and I feel like a lot of people look at pop music with a very formulaic perspective in numbers and patterns, but an outsider would think that the process is very natural.
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If a man begins writing at thirty, by the time he is fifty or sixty, the bulk of his work has been done. By the time he is eighty, he's got nothing more, you know?
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If a man has money, it is usually a sign, too, that he knows how to take care of it; don't imagine his money is easy to get simply because he has plenty of it.
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I always said I'm not disappointed with Obama because I voted for him because he was black, and as long as he kept being black, I was a happy man.
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I would love to have some sort of 'Back To The Future' Delorean time machine travel device so I could go back to 1981 to see that very first Jackson 5 concert I went to, back when I was a kid.
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When you look at someone good like J.J. Abrams who gives you the spectacle and great action set pieces but also gives you character and great story and plotting and narrative, I think it's my job - and my intention - to do both.
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What impresses men is not mind, but the result of mind.
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The creative scientific process is - It's kind of - It's a windy road that has a trajectory, but it's a slow trajectory.
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Because art as a pursuit, as a concept, as an ideal, constantly elevates one above the pragmatic, one is inclined to discuss art in heightened terminologies. For me, it is just what I do all day long.
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One guy that I wish was here right now, Ted Williams, helped me so much, our long talks, not about hitting but about fishing, one of Ted's passions, and I wish he was here today to share this with me because I owe so much to Ted Williams.
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My original idea was to produce and not make records myself.
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Most people learn to improvise on their own, listening to records, endless hours of noodling on their instrument in the bedroom with all their spare time. That's traditionally how people learn.
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I live by a hill. I began walking it and then I began jogging it and then I began sprinting it.
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I'm at the age most people are sending their kids off to college.
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A man has a birthright to be tired and retired. I am retired completely.
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I am deeply concerned with the diminution of the teaching strength of the country as a result of the disproportionately low salaries that are paid to teachers throughout the country.
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I found poetry at 12 and 13 and, lo and behold, learned that my attorney father had a background in poetry - as he wore dashikis and Afros in the '70s and named his kids Arabic names. He was a poet and a lot like The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron and all of these folks. He definitely was an artist.
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When I was a kid, we got in a cipher and battled each other lyrically. We told jokes and made the hottest dance moves.
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A parentologist is a person who writes a book about parenting that is very clear about answers to, 'How am I supposed to raise my child?' Some of these well-intentioned people may be a bit too sure-footed on the sometimes slippery slope of parenting.
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You don't need to have kids to write a good book for kids. I don't want my kids to see themselves in my books. Their lives should be their lives.
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the whistle of the old steam trains ... could conjure up visions of bleak distances with one solitary wail.
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My greatest enemy is reality. I have fought it successfully for thirty years.
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In a poem, the words happen; they just come. I let them. Otherwise, I wouldn't write. To interfere with what is happening is to distort the poem. Just a very small degree of intelligence and supervision is necessary. Very tactful. Any revision later that violates the text as it came, that begins rewriting the words, is fake.
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I read The Stinky Cheese Man as an adult. I missed that book when I was a kid. I grew up mostly with books bought at yard sales, picture books from the fifties to 1975, which is really a lucky thing.
