El Anatsui Quotes
I come from a place where you have a lot of sky. But in New York City you have to really look up to realize that there is eventually sky, somewhere. ...Sky is not a common commodity.
Quotes to Explore
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Living in New York City is one constant, ongoing literary pilgrimage. For 20 years, I lived among the ghosts of great writers and walked where they had walked.
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I never saw movies I was in because my mom told me that would be prideful, being stuck on yourself.
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Events at home, at work, in the street - these are the bases for a story.
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There's not much money in Tallahassee. Not many people can leave Tallahassee because they don't have the means.
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Workmen's compensation, hours and conditions of labor are cold consolations, if there be no employment.
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Caste is not just a division of labour, it is a division of labourers.
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If the tenth of the population that is gay became visible tomorrow, the panic of the majority of people would inspire repressive legislation of a sort that would shock even the pessimists among us.
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Some of my friends are giving me law books. I love reading those. It's like my relaxation.
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I have a very difficult time describing my music. Because I run into people in the hardware store and they go, 'Oh, you're a musician. So what kind of music do you play?' And I go, 'Uh, I've been doin' this for many years - I don't know what to call it.'
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I don't think I can plate-spin, I've turned loads of things down because I just can't get the time to do it.
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Singing is actually my favourite thing to do in the world - so when you don't consider yourself as talented at anything academically, and there is one thing you're good at, I think it's best to follow what you're good at.
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You all know that each title in the Chronicles has a chess theme; that's partly because of the overall design of the Chronicles themselves - the game of chess as an analogue of the game of life.
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I am not one of those who thinks that Congress needs to be in session 24 hours a day interfering in peoples' lives.
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But the threat posed by the radical Islamists represents an unusual conflict, unlike any experienced by our nation before: we face an enemy that is not a state.
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Well, then we got to know each other and eventually worked out a bit of idea of management.
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None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but licence.
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I wish everyone was a sci-fi geek because then there would be no violence in the world. There'd be no wars. There'd only be people e-mailing each other.
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You get a bad review with a novel, and it hurts. But I imagine if you get a bad review with a memoir, it hurts more because you can always say, 'Well, they didn't like my characters,' but when you're the character, it's like, 'Oh, yeah, they actually didn't like me.'
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The world isn't tidy; it's a mess. I don't try to make it neat.
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The soul of the slave, the soul of the "little man," is as dear to me as the soul of the great.
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It is the duty of every cultured man or woman to read sympathetically the scriptures of the world. If we are to respect others' religions as we would have them respect our own, a friendly study of the world's religions is a sacred duty.
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We should not become so ashamed of the disappointments and travesties of democracy that we become ashamed of the idea itself. It is the outer reflection of our self-acceptance.
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I come from a place where you have a lot of sky. But in New York City you have to really look up to realize that there is eventually sky, somewhere. ...Sky is not a common commodity.
