William Bolcom Quotes
I knew I was going to be composing. It all makes sense in retrospect. But you don't know while you're in the process of improvising your life.
Quotes to Explore
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I'm a mother of three. I don't really have the time to put very elaborate outfits together, so I keep it casual but dress it up with shoes, a bag, and jewellery.
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There is no rational reason to doubt that the universe has existed indefinitely, for an infinite time. It is only myth that attempts to say how the universe came to be, either four thousand or twenty billion years ago.
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It is not true that I dictate what should be done. There is a dialogue.
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I've only twice in my life come across someone with both high IQ and high EQ naturally; and that was because their parents were super high EQ, and the parents just EQ'd the hell out of them. They're inevitably very successful because now you've got someone who's sharper than the average person and well-rounded, too.
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It's pretty hard to make out what's going to be a commercial success and what's not.
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In some sense, what you might have suspected from the first day of high-school chemistry is true: The periodic table is a colossal waste of time. Nine out of every 10 atoms in the universe are hydrogen, the first element and the major constituent of stars. The other 10 percent of all atoms are helium.
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I like to write with a lot of emotion and a lot of power. Sometimes I overdo it; sometimes my prose is a little bit too purple, and I know that.
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Respect for women was a very important part of my upbringing.
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If I can put it together, I've got an opportunity to win.
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I grew up in a hippie commune so I have a real hippie part of me.
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Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very'; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
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I wasn't a very good student in elementary school and had a hard time with reading and writing.
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I prefer doing interviews where people don't have to interpret what you say. I'm going to be real honest.
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I may be a star in the South, but when I go to Bollywood, I am a clean slate, a white paper. Whatever the director makes of me is what I will become for the audience.
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In a city like New York, any night can be completely different, even in a subtle way.
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I view Bitcoin as the more democratic version of money and value transfer because no one controls it... I expect the Internet to be around longer than any nation-state, so a nation-state-backed currency is actually less safe than an Internet currency in my mind.
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I think one of my first jokes - in the black community, there's people who have jokes about skin tone. People like, 'You so black, you purple.' 'You so black, you gotta smile so we can see you at night.'
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The things that you know intellectually when you're young become internalized as you get older. You realize all those clichés.
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Malcolm X was the first prominent American to attack and to criticize the U.S. role in Southeast Asia, and he came out four-square against the Vietnam War in 1964, long before the vast majority of Americans did.
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...I begin with songs. They provide a sort of skeleton grammar for me to flesh out. Songs of longing for future tense, songs of regret for past tense, and songs of love for present tense.
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I used to live on a reserve, but I went back and forth between my reserve and Ottawa where my father lived, so I kind of had a double life growing up.
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Life doesn't care about your vision. Stuff happens, and you've just got to deal with it. You roll with it; that's the beauty of it all.
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I knew I was going to be composing. It all makes sense in retrospect. But you don't know while you're in the process of improvising your life.
