Ricky Jay Quotes
Once you get into the era of the printed book, it gets a little easier. After years and years, you make a serious survey of that literature, and then you make it more specific depending on what kind of case appears. I never set out to collect material on cheating at bowling, but I found out that after 20 years, I had a lot of material on cheating at bowling.
Quotes to Explore
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Secret families are really the bedrock issue of Western literature.
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A lie with a purpose is one of the worst kind, and the most profitable.
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A book is a gift you can open again and again.
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Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature: What will happen next?
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Wherever you look there are inspirations, books, literature, paintings, landscapes, everything. Just living is an inspiration.
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What I look for in any book is an argument, based on evidence, that changes the way I think about something important.
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In a typical history book, black Americans are mentioned in the context of slavery or civil rights. There's so much more to the story.
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When I did 'Don't Look Back,' I no longer had Time-Life looking over my shoulder, so I could kind of do it as I wanted, and it was like I was really correcting 'Jane.'
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Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.
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Writing blurbs for books means you have to read the book, and it cuts into the business of bookselling. So every time I get a blurb from a bookseller, I try to write a thank you note.
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The ideal of behaviorism is to eliminate coercion: to apply controls by changing the environment in such a way as to reinforce the kind of behavior that benefits everyone.
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How you deal with adversity says a lot about the kind of players you've got and the kind of team we've got.
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She's the kind of girl who climbed the ladder of success wrong by wrong.
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Cindy Sheehan is a clown. There is no real antiwar movement. No serious politician, with anything to do with anything, would show his face at an antiwar rally.
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Even though 'Hemlock Grove' was a serious, supernatural mystery, it was pretty fun on set. It was a light mood.
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I kind of treat myself like the audience. I don't like being lectured.
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My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.
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I just like the comic book sensibility. If I can turn them into films and TV series, that's just icing on the cake.
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Historians whose profession is to study the past, are as wary as scientists of the idea that events unfold in a manner that can be predicted. In fact, in a study of history the illusion of inevitability has serious consequences that it is one of the few things that both conservative and socialist historians can agree on.
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In college, I wrote newspaper articles and songs. Then, on my 21st birthday, I sold my first book. It was a nonfiction book about women pirates - 'Pirates in Petticoats.' After that, I was a book writer for good.
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'John Henry Days' was already half in the can before my first book came out, so I'd already started something that was big and sprawling - I just had to finish it.
Colson Whitehead -
What having a Down's syndrome child isn't - and I feel very strongly about this - is a tragedy. All those pregnancy books you read when you are expecting refer to Down's syndrome as if it were the worst possible outcome, and it's not.
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I was convinced that our beliefs are based much more on custom and example than on any certain knowledge.
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Once you get into the era of the printed book, it gets a little easier. After years and years, you make a serious survey of that literature, and then you make it more specific depending on what kind of case appears. I never set out to collect material on cheating at bowling, but I found out that after 20 years, I had a lot of material on cheating at bowling.
