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.

Elliott Colla

• Work
• English
• Fiction
• Program
• Master
• Translating
• I Wrote

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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.

  

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• 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.

  

  Florence Welch Florence and the Machine
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  • Artists
  • Dramatic

• Timidity does not inspire bold acts.

  

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  • Timidity

• There's nothing that will change someone's moral outlook quicker than cash in large sums.

  

  Larry Flynt
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  • Nothing

• I know exactly what it is like to fight against the odds and to overcome adversity.

  

  Karen Handel
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• 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.

  

  Eckhard Pfeiffer
  • People
  • Different
  • Small

• I feel like, when I'm 100% healthy, I can do anything.

  

  Katarina Johnson-Thompson
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  • Healthy

• 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.

  

  Larry Wall
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• I grew up eating Cuban food all the time.

  

  Ted Cruz
  • Up
  • Time
  • Food

• I am a big, confident, happy woman who had a loving childhood, a pleasant career, and a wonderful marriage. I feel very lucky.

  

  Maeve Binchy
  • Happy
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  • Marriage

• When you go from one place to another, you go with experience, you don't go with prescriptions.

  

  Lakhdar Brahimi
  • Experience
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  • Place

• So, for me the town hall meetings are really an opportunity to engage in two-way dialogue with people, and they've been very helpful.

  

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  • People
  • Opportunity
  • Me

• 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.

  

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  • Live
  • Vision
  • Young

• 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.

  

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  • High
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• 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.

  

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  • City
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• I hate feeling like a prisoner. I show up somewhere, and I can't explore the city because there's, like, 6,000 to 10,000 people on the lookout for me.

  

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• I know more than anyone the divergent views about my father. I want to be judged on my own merits.

  

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• I'm addicted to avocados, and I'll put them with anything, particularly chillies. Can you imagine if they became extinct? That would be like the apocalypse, no?

  

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• You get on TV and you become more of a star and it makes it real hard to go back to school and sit in a classroom, put your hand up if you have a question or something.

  

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• Rom-coms have been one of my favorite genres of movies since I can remember. My favorite movie of all-time is 'Four Weddings and a Funeral,' and then 'When Harry Met Sally,' and 'Annie Hall' is top five.

  

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• You need only visit campuses where whole departments feature soft courses preaching a sense of victimhood and resentment, and see the consequences in racial and ethnic polarization on campus.

  

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• I'm probably creative for half an hour a day. The rest of the time, I'm just doing what's necessary to make that creativity visible.

  

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• When professors expect a few dozen students and hundreds show up, it's a mixed blessing. While it's a testament to their popularity, it also means they have to scramble to interview and hire more teaching fellows, schedule rooms, and order lab supplies.

  

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  • Up

• 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.

  

  Elliott Colla
  • Work
  • English
  • Fiction