Whitney Balliett Quotes
Critics are biased, and so are readers. (Indeed, a critic is a bundle of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste.) But intelligent readers soon discover how to allow for the windage of their own and a critic's prejudices.
Quotes to Explore
-
I breathe martial arts every day of my life.
-
Now, everybody knows my music. So that's really cool. A lot of kids know it. Now, when I go to a sports game, everybody knows my name.
-
I am obsessed with the whole Victoriana thing, the whole Jack the Ripper London era, the grayness of it, the haunted feeling of it, all ancient and bloody.
-
There's a great freedom in writing by yourself. You can write anything you want.
-
'Independents' - the industry term for companies that have more capital and know-how than the typical 'wildcatter' - can grow either by exploring and finding reserves or by buying a company that already has them.
-
The Constitution shall never be construed... to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms.
-
I try to do things I love or care about for some reason.
-
The moon is a friend for the lonesome to talk to.
-
A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish.
-
Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion. Our brains merely register and act upon what is telegraphed to them by our bodily experience. Intellect is to emotion as our clothes are to our bodies; we could not very well have civilized life without clothes, but we would be in a poor way if we had only clothes without bodies.
-
It's pretty easy to get sucked into a vortex of others and what their thoughts are and letting other people's judgments of you make you actually believe them about yourself. And sometimes you just need people to remind you that none of it means anything.
-
Three women in my family, close relatives, have had breast cancer, and two have died from it, and still I never thought it could happen to me. I didn't even regularly check my breasts.
-
What you really want to do is sit down and find a place that you can control government spending and raise more revenue.
-
When I look back, I'm definitely proud of what I did. It kind of allows me to move forward and reset my goals.
-
I don't want to discuss my breasts with the whole world!
-
I have a love affair with tomatoes and corn. I remember them from my childhood. I only had them in the summer. They were extraordinary.
-
I feel so free and open to ideas, and I get inspired by everything.
-
It's a perfect wave when small and the most beautiful and scary wave on Earth when it's big, as the swell from deep water hits the shallow reef ledge. A ten-foot high wave and a 30-footer break in the same depth of water.
-
I was a pretty free-spirited kid. I was part of a notorious group of troublemakers who didn't do well in school but had a great time exploring Beijing from the inside out.
-
To be very blunt, I am not really that concerned with what labels get associated with somebody.
-
People love me everywhere I go.
-
I know where my heart is and I know that I can make people feel something with my music. I'm quite confident in what I am doing, so if I can also make a song that people want to put in ten times during a party and makes them happy, then I think that is also good. I feel that playfulness is something that has entered my life a lot more in the last couple of years. I'm not taking everything too seriously. I think that is something that comes with age - I hope. I feel that music is much more fun for me than it has ever been.
-
If you're gonna tell a story from beginning to end, I always think you have to have a great structure in a script. If it gets you excited and it's something you've never read before that's another plus. I think also with improv and that whole world of stand-up, that's a whole other organism of comedy that still needs a story, but it's more free-form. On the set, it is the combination of both those worlds coming together: a great script and an allowance to play with it.
-
Critics are biased, and so are readers. (Indeed, a critic is a bundle of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste.) But intelligent readers soon discover how to allow for the windage of their own and a critic's prejudices.
