P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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Not to oversimplify it, somebody once said a good rule of thumb in interpreting a character is to find the good in the bad people that you portray and the bad in the good.
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Walking down the street in any town or city in the world and having people look at you and start talking to you, convinced that they know you as well or better than they do members of their own family, that's just an odd phenomenon. But I mean, I wouldn't say it was a bad thing. It's an interesting thing.
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In my memoir, I admit that I've been as fearful of success as of failure. In fact, when 'Passages' was published, I so dreaded bad reviews that I ran away to Italy with a girlfriend and our children to hide out.
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When we bemoan the lost golden age of music, it's worth remembering that mainstream radio listeners of the '60s and '70s, particularly in Canada, missed out on an outpouring of brilliant R&B music.
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Reporters tend to find in others what they are suited to find, so there is a whole school of reporting where they are cynical about the world, and everything reinforces that. Whereas I tend to be optimistic and be amused by people and like them, even rather bad people.
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Why should people go out and pay money to see bad films when they can stay at home and see bad television for nothing?
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Readers of novels often fall into the bad habit of being overly exacting about the characters' moral flaws. They apply to these fictional beings standards that no one they know in real life could possibly meet.
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Most people think companies are basically evil. They get a bad rap. And I think that's somewhat correct.
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I used to sit in front of McDonald's and ask people for dollars to get me a cheeseburger. It was bad.
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Black Sabbath invented heavy metal, in my opinion.
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The people in the villages had turned in on themselves. You can understand it. When you have a bad day on the field, what do you do? Talk to your teammates.
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Civil lawsuits do two important things: they compensate people who are injured by the bad acts of others, and they penalize people and companies for bad behavior.
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When improv is bad, it's excruciating to watch, and to be involved with it is a unique type of torture.
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I purposefully try to make films in that grey area, where things are morally ambiguous. It's like life: good people do horrible things, and bad people do good things, and there's beauty in horror and horror in beauty.
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A competitor will find a way to win. Competitors take bad breaks and use them to drive themselves just that much harder. Quitters take bad breaks and use them as reasons to give up. It's all a matter of pride.
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I live in Ireland near the sea, only one mile from where I grew up - that's good, since I've known many of my neighbours for between 50-60 years. Gordon and I play chess every day, and we are both equally bad. We play chatty, over-talkative bad bridge with friends every week.
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The nature of the Catilinarian conspiracy was bad and bloody.
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Every bad precedent originated as a justifiable measure.
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I know it's bad to generalize, but when you think about billionaires, you just think this guy is going to walk into a room and just demand things to be a certain way.
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That's all small talk is - a quick way to connect on a human level - which is why it is by no means as irrelevant as the people who are bad at it insist. In short, it's worth making the effort.
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When people ask me silly questions about my private life, I just say, I don't discuss that.
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If you've been in a film that's seen by millions and millions and millions of people, you're more likely to be recognized for that than for your theater performances, which were seen by considerably less people. Why would I get upset by that?
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Somalia is so bad that making a mess improves the place.
