Elliott Colla Quotes
I wrote Baghdad Central right after translating a great work by Ibrahim al-Koni, who is sort of a master of Arab fiction. In conversations with him I realized that translations have been my MFA program. If I have learned how to write fiction it's by working with great writers and getting them to explain their craft to me so that I can do it in English. That's how I've figured it out.
Quotes to Explore
-
I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man's pleasure when they come a cropper.
-
I quite like the drama of an encore. I think an encore is for those artists who are inclined to do dramatic gestures, and I certainly would say I am inclined towards them.
-
Timidity does not inspire bold acts.
-
There's nothing that will change someone's moral outlook quicker than cash in large sums.
-
I know exactly what it is like to fight against the odds and to overcome adversity.
-
Sometimes it's more difficult to achieve a 10% cost reduction than it is to tell people they have to achieve 50%. Small incremental steps block your view of doing something fundamentally different.
-
I think the way IBM has embraced the open source philosophy has been quite astonishing, but gratifying. I hope they'll do very well with it.
-
I grew up eating Cuban food all the time.
-
I am a big, confident, happy woman who had a loving childhood, a pleasant career, and a wonderful marriage. I feel very lucky.
-
When you go from one place to another, you go with experience, you don't go with prescriptions.
-
I suppose being quite young and being thrust quite dramatically into a large public arena skewered my vision of what it means to live and be a part of something.
-
High-stakes lying is out of control. And it's costing us big bucks in one way or another. It's not simply a matter of quantifying losses in dollars. It's costing us emotionally and psychologically as well.
-
I'm a big foodie. Hyderabadi cuisine is amazing, and the kind of mutton dishes available at some restaurants in the Old City is incredible.
-
I know more than anyone the divergent views about my father. I want to be judged on my own merits.
-
I finally, you know, moved to Mexico City, where the film industry is. I started working there as a producer, which is a very, very valid thing for women to do, because we always produce for men, right?
-
My father is my idol, and I have grown up watching his films. He is my biggest influence and inspiration. I have learnt a lot from him, and I am who I am because of him. I'm extremely grateful to him for that.
-
The worst thing you could ever get is people who think they know everything.
-
David - the man after God's own heart - was a man of war and a mighty man of valour. When all Israel were on the run, David faced Goliath - alone... with God - and he but a stripling, and well scolded, too, by his brother for having come to see the battle.
-
Wild Bill was a strange character. In person he was about six feet and one inch in height. He was a Plains-man in every sense of the word.
-
If you interview people or friends who work with me, they would say I'm private or internal or don't emote a lot. Yet I do it every day for 10 million people. I just don't do it for the 30 people I'm in the room with.
-
As much as I devoured comics, I read non-graphic books exponentially more, so I'm not sure I can credit or blame them. Comics, however, taught me a lot about what makes a story arc work and how to bring a story to its natural resting place between issues.
-
The main purpose of life is to live rightly, think rightly, act rightly. The soul must languish when we give all our thought to the body.
-
People judge you really quickly, at first just on your facial features. There are two dimensions - warmth and competence. You can think of them as trustworthiness and strength. They're first judging you on warmth; evaluating whether or not you are trustworthy. That's much more important to them than whether or not you're competent.
-
I wrote Baghdad Central right after translating a great work by Ibrahim al-Koni, who is sort of a master of Arab fiction. In conversations with him I realized that translations have been my MFA program. If I have learned how to write fiction it's by working with great writers and getting them to explain their craft to me so that I can do it in English. That's how I've figured it out.
