Tayari Jones Quotes
I like straightforward names for my characters. When I get too symbolic with names or places, I start feeling like the characters and the story are less read, and I lose interest.
Quotes to Explore
-
The minute I stop singing orally, I start to sing by playing Lucille.
-
One of the strangest experiences one can have is to sleep on stage, as I once did in Sydney when I'd lost the key to my flat. I had to stay at night in a bed, which conveniently was on stage because my character Sandy Stone did his monologue from a bed. To wake up looking at a shadowy auditorium is a very peculiar feeling.
-
Emotions come first, and in the most direct sense: you first have an emotion and then have a feeling. But also first in the history of the human race, for the ability to have emotions long preceded the ability to have feelings.
-
What I'm trying to do is to write a story. If you take something from it, that's wonderful; if you don't, that's wonderful as well.
-
When you start to think about politicians, you've got to realize these are strange creatures. Other than the fact that they can't tell directions, and they have very strange breeding habits, how do you actually work with these things?
-
90%, 100% are going there to hear the singing. The story is another thing. Nobody's interested in the story. Happiness is happiness.
-
A guy running, you know, fifteen, twenty stallions that are two years of age, never been touched by a human before, and you've got to start castrating them, that's pretty intimidating.
-
Laughing and crying are very similar. They're an extreme response to life. You see it in children who start laughing hysterically.
-
I was also the romantic lead in The Boston Strangler - I was the only one that lived to tell the story - so I called myself the romantic lead.
-
We should start by allowing drilling in Alaska's National Wildlife Refuge. It can provide billions of barrels of recoverable oil and trillions of cubic feet of recoverable natural gas.
-
I would love a bowl of Frosties, but I start the day with something healthier like a bowl of yoghurt or berries.
-
I fantasise about what the future could be in terms of aesthetic and psychology. It's the most difficult thing to do because you have to start from the past - your favourite architect, your favourite song - you take it all with you.
-
When 5150 came out rock was king. Post Nirvana and Pearl Jam 1996 is a different story.
-
There really isn't a story that you can't tell inside of it. It's very much a clearinghouse for anything that goes on in the world. So you're not at all limited.
-
As a writer, I had learned a lot on 'Margin Call' about embracing the weaknesses of a narrative and of a project. A story always has an inherent narrative weakness.
-
There is a feeling, when you listen to radio, that it's one person, and they're talking to you, and you really feel their presence as one person.
-
It was easy to persecute me without people feeling ashamed. It was easy to vilify me and project me as a woman who was not following the tradition of a 'good African woman' and as a highly educated elitist who was trying to show innocent African women ways of doing things that were not acceptable to African men.
-
I was told that when I'm dancing, I give off the feeling of a rainy day.
-
If I'm in something that I think is kinda good, it stays with me like a fever dream for a long time afterwards. I don't recall the finished product so much as the feeling of making it.
-
Is there an equality of power between America and Iraq? Definitely not; however, the Iraqi people are standing fast and are defending their land courageously.
-
If you call yourself a leader, then you have to be decisive. If you're decisive, then you have the chance to be a leader. These are two sides to the same coin.
-
Most of us don't invent ideas. We take the best ideas from someone else.
-
Civilization has made man, if not always more bloodthirsty, at least more viciously, more horribly bloodthirsty.
-
I like straightforward names for my characters. When I get too symbolic with names or places, I start feeling like the characters and the story are less read, and I lose interest.
