William Hazlitt Quotes
A great man la an abstraction of some one excellence; but whoever fancies himself an abstraction of excellence, so far from being great, may be sure that he is a blockhead, equally ignorant of excellence or defect of himself or others.
Quotes to Explore
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I was brought up with beautiful music - Nat King Cole and Glen Miller from my dad, and my mum loved Judy Garland and Doris Day - brilliant stuff. Through my brothers and sisters I heard David Bowie and The Specials, The Carpenters, Meatloaf and The Rolling Stones.
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I was in San Francisco for 'Trauma' and then got back to town and got situated and started looking at things and passing on things. I think I was around for a month and a half, and there were other projects that were up, but it's all a waiting game. And then, 'The Vampire Diaries' came up, and I was really interested and read for it.
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I really love to make sweeping historical gestures that are like little illustrations of novels.
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Don't manage - lead change before you have to.
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It's one thing to get a letter from your kid at camp telling you he wants to come home. It's another to get a letter from a grown child saying they're coming back to live with you!
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As you probably know, I've written a lot about the presidency, so it's obviously exciting when you get to interview a president and write about it.
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I would be very happy doing movies. I love to work and I think I'm a little different.
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I've never had to pitch a movie to a studio. I usually just let people read the script, then I cast it. I always think pitching is for baseball.
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I dig all kinds of competition.
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I really hate the term 'historical novel' - it reminds me of bodice-rippers. But I'm hooked on research, and I really, really enjoy it.
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A writer is someone who tells you one thing so someday he can tell his readers another thing: what he was thinking but declined to say, or what he would have thought had he been wiser. A writer turns his life into material, and if you're in his life, he uses yours, too.
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In the calculus of western interests, there is no suffering, whatever its scale, which cannot be justified. Chechens, Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis are of little importance.
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It was never important for a wedding to be about anything other than me and my partner. A big celebration was never my cup of tea.
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I could hum Beatles songs before I could talk - not very well, but sort of.
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I was always in love with Judy Garland, and when I was growing up, I fell in love with Leonardo DiCaprio, of course.
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Jazz is not something that can be defined through blunt instruments. It is much more poetic than that.
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Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace.
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A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.
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An illness is a failure to solve a mental or psychological problem in the correct manner . . . The energy that would be used to solve the problem instead is spent maintaining the illness. It is therefore necessary that an attempt be made as soon as possible to solve the problem, which of course must first be discovered by the ego, which has avoided it.
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It's so important to spend your free time with little people. They grow up before you know it. Childhood is gone in the blink of an eye.
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There won't be any changes until we have another depression like in the 1930s, which we have not approached yet in the present recession.
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We are not truly civilized if we concern ourselves only with the relation of man to man. What is important is the relation of man to all life.
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A mood of constructive criticism being upon me, I propose forthwith that the method of choosing legislators now prevailing in the United States be abandoned and that the method used in choosing juries be substituted. That is to say, I propose that the men who make our laws be chosen by chance and against will of all the rest of us, as now.
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A great man la an abstraction of some one excellence; but whoever fancies himself an abstraction of excellence, so far from being great, may be sure that he is a blockhead, equally ignorant of excellence or defect of himself or others.
