T. C. Boyle Quotes
The professorial dictum has always been to write what you know, but I say write what you don't know and find something out. And it works.
Quotes to Explore
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Burroughs called his greatest novel 'Naked Lunch,' by which he meant it's what you see on the end of a fork. Telling the truth. It's very difficult to do that in fiction because the whole process of writing fiction is a process of sidestepping the truth. I think he got very close to it, in his way, and I hope I've done the same in mine.
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I've always made sequels, even when I was making Super 8 movies if the audience liked it.
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I go straight from thinking about my narrator to being him.
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Perhaps I'm particularly serious, because I'm not unaware of the potential absurdity of what I'm doing.
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I have big hands. I can't do the touch-screen thing. I'm a button guy. I want to press buttons.
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I think that when you don't look at the good things around you, that you lose sight of all those good things. And you're not going to enjoy your life.
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I have never thought of a full-fledged career in Bollywood because boxing has never left my mind. But you never know.
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After World War I the resentment of the working class against all that it had to suffer was directed more against Morgan, Wall Street and private capital than the government.
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As a woman, I've learned that having a uniform of your staples or setting your look and saying what distinguishes you - like red lips or hair or whatever - leaves so much time for the rest of the day.
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There's no smarter politician out there than Bill Clinton.
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I knew that I wanted to be an actor; how to go about it was the question. I went to Australia for my studies; from there I told my dad that I also want to do a course in performing arts, but my father refused. So I completed my studies and came back. But I kept poking him, saying that acting is something that I want to do.
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The whole of society is like a cabbage-stalk covered with caterpillars, and none is satisfied till it has crawled to the top.
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I am that guy who will say things that people seem to think is a little edgy, a little racy.
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'Wicked' gave us a story that 'The Wizard of Oz' did not. Two sides to every story.
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I'll talk about these things, but it's just, you know, you only get so much time and I'm much more interested in what I'm going to be doing next year than in something I did 10 years ago.
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I am a kind of paranoid in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.
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I remember before the Olympics, I was asked, 'What do you think you're going to do in the Olympics?' and I said, 'I'm hoping I'm going to win a medal, and, if possible, it's going to be a gold one.'
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There is inspiration all around us.
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In the '30s, the Keynesian stuff worked at least in the sense that you could print money without inflation because there was all this productivity growth happening. That's not going to work today.
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In your short stay in Atlanta, I'm sure you saw that there was great competition between Martin's [Luther King] father and John Wesley Dobbs in terms of family status. You know, the bragging about whose child got a master's degree first and whose child, maybe, was the first Ph.D. Out of a background like that, the business of becoming a chairman of an important movement or a movement that symbolizes a certain amount of prestige is something you don't resist easily.
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The book doesn't end when you finish writing it.
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When I'm writing a song, it's just me and the songwriters. Then when the song is done, there are publishers that hear it, then people in my management, then my wife and my boys and my friends, and if they're all lovin' it, it's kind of withstanding all the criticism I need.
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I know my boundaries. I know the limits to the car.
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The professorial dictum has always been to write what you know, but I say write what you don't know and find something out. And it works.
