Virgil Thomson Quotes
I seem to write an opera about every 20 years; if you live long enough you can write four operas. I finished my third in 1970.
Quotes to Explore
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Immortality is really desirable, I guess. In terms of images, anyway.
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I quite like the drama of an encore. I think an encore is for those artists who are inclined to do dramatic gestures, and I certainly would say I am inclined towards them.
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Without a dog, no one will listen to your opinions for more than a few minutes without interrupting to tell you their opinions, which you won't find nearly as interesting.
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If you want to put golf back on the front pages again, and you don't have a Bobby Jones or a Francis Ouimet handy, here's what you do: You send an aging Jack Nicklaus out in the last round of the Masters and let him kill more foreigners than a general named Eisenhower.
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I just have to go out and fight my fight and fight to win.
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I have an iPod, but I put my music in it from my CDs, and then I have that CD in my library.
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I'm kind of sarcastic. Not cynical but sarcastic.
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One Direction is the main thing I'm doing and I'm 100 per cent dedicated to the group.
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The Irish do not want anyone to wish them well; they want everyone to wish their enemies ill.
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Yoga takes what you have and molds and sculpts it, which is a much more natural way to look and feel.
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Every time you go to the doctor and get a good report, the odds keep staking more in your favour.
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I feel like an alien. I feel people don't like me. People behaved strangely after 'Rockstar.'
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Unless and until you inspire the people, you will not get results. Imposition will never give you the results. Inspiration will always give you the results.
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In a repressed society, artists fulfil a sense of harking back to instant gratification, or immediate expression, by doing things that function on the edge of society, or outside of what is conventionally accepted.
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Normally I don't watch myself, because I'm not very objective.
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Creating more and better jobs is how you build a strong economy.
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Car chases are as painstaking to make as they are fun to watch. They take a lot of time, and you have to keep the energy up.
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I was brought up in the shadow of the Holocaust. My mother lost most of her family, and I didn't realize how much the guilt of survivorship weighed on her until I was an adult.
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We live in a moment and a culture when reading is really endangered. There's simply no way to write well, though, if you're not reading well.
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Perhaps the critics are right: this generation may not produce literature equal to that of any past generation-who cares? The writer will be dead before anyone can judge him-but he must go on writing, reflecting disorder, defeat, despair, should that be all he sees at the moment, but ever searching for the elusive love, joy, and hope-qualities which, as in the act of life itself, are best when they have to be struggled for, and are not commonly come by with much ease, either by a critic's formula or by a critic's yearning.
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Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be.
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The question that comes up a lot is, if you had the chance to erase your memory of something specific, what would you erase? And my answer has always been, I wouldn't erase anything, personally. In some ways, I almost wouldn't want to erase anything from the public consciousness, either, for the same reason.
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If I could do what Hilary Mantel does, I would probably do that. She is more intelligent and a better researcher and knows more what she's about than I do.
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I seem to write an opera about every 20 years; if you live long enough you can write four operas. I finished my third in 1970.
