Adam Haslett Quotes
If the history of the American sentence were a John Ford movie, its second act would conclude with the young Ernest Hemingway walking into a saloon, finding an etiolated Henry James slumped at the bar in a haze of indecision, and shooting him dead.
Quotes to Explore
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I think it's more and more important to spend time with your children, because it seems to be harder and harder for them to succeed as their parents have succeeded.
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I think the interesting thing about the word 'posh' is that it is so relative; it's quite a provocative title because people have strong feelings about that word.
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There had always been black people in and out of our house, and from the outset I had been taught that for them life was defined by struggle and filled with injustice.
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As a legal matter, my mother is an American citizen by birth.
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Human faces shouldn't get lost amid the statistics.
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You look at a horse, and he's such a majestic, beautiful, powerful creature that you can't not be impressed. I love scraping the water off them when I wash them down because you go all round the contours, and its muscle and body, and you just think, 'Ooh, isn't this a magnificent creature.' You're touching it, and it's just solid, carved muscle.
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My paternal grandfather was a failed novelist. He stacked boxes of rejected manuscripts in a closet.
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Language is possible due to a number of cognitive and physical characteristics that are unique to humans but none of which that are unique to language. Coming together they make language possible. But the fundamental building block of language is community.
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The great thing about writing compared to life is getting to tie things up.
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In Japan, there's a TV series called Jin. It deals with time travel. I like stories about time travel. It's a story about people living in modern day that travel back to the Edo era. Those things really interest me.
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Education can counteract the natural tendency to do the wrong thing, but the inexorable succession of generations requires that the basis for this knowledge be constantly refreshed.
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The reason I dislike talking about the creative process is that I do have a creative process that is a winner and it's a sure thing.
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We have an open society. No one will come and take me away for saying what I am saying. But they don't have to, if they can control how many people hear it. And that's how they do it.
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She was an enthusiastic painter of oils and watercolors. She was also very generous. I could mess with her paints and brushes all I wanted. On one condition: that I kept my brushes clean. The only art lesson my mother gave me was how to wash my brushes.
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The most obvious criticism of aid is its links to rampant corruption. Aid flows destined to help the average African end up supporting bloated bureaucracies in the form of the poor-country governments and donor-funded non-governmental organizations.
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On the one hand, Porto Monenegro is shape-shifting - it replaced a naval shipyard with a new marina - but it's also mind-shifting, opening up an array of other small business opportunities. And this shape-shifting and mind-shifting, it is exactly what we're trying to do in Montenegro.
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By mid-morning, I take a break from my novel and work on my Sunday Style column, which is about pop culture and what I find on the web. I usually start writing it at the beginning of the week and give it a couple of days to marinate before I return to it.
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I was teased if I brought my books home. I would take a paper bag to the library and put the books in the bag and bring them home. Not that I was that concerned about them teasing me - because I would hit them in a heartbeat. But I felt a little ashamed, having books.
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I have no doubt that aggressively going after wrongdoing can result in real improvement. Fewer wrongdoers in city government means more honest employees; it means better city services; it means more efficient government. And punishing wrongdoing can have a strong ripple effect that deters others from going down the wrong path.
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What does being a woman today mean? Is there a right way of doing it? Is there a wrong way of doing it? Different kinds of women, female friendships: It's all pretty funny, and worth making fun of.
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I've always wanted to do a boxing movie.
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So there was one point I thought I was gonna lose it, but once I get on something I have to finish it; I just kept persuading them and they turned around. One good thing was the international guys really stood behind this movie, they thought they could support this film. So these guys step up and that's really good, and then they turned around.
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Reading the script for 'Jennifer's Body,' I just thought that here was a script that really exposes the horror between girls and friendships. I always sort of approached the film with that in mind first, and then thought about the crazy ways that that horror would express itself.
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If the history of the American sentence were a John Ford movie, its second act would conclude with the young Ernest Hemingway walking into a saloon, finding an etiolated Henry James slumped at the bar in a haze of indecision, and shooting him dead.
