P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
The Republican convention, an event with the intellectual content of a Guns'n'Roses lyric attended by every ofay insurance brokerin America who owns a pair of white shoes.
Quotes to Explore
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The point really is that a writer tends to write a book that he or she tends to write. It's as simple as that. Of course, it's important to make a living and all that, but the main impulse as far as I'm concerned - and I'm sure as other writers are concerned - is to tell a story that I feel impelled by.
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Gory stuff can be shocking but it doesn't really scare me. I'd say the kind of stuff that gets under my skin is the unknown. You hear a knock behind a wall and you don't know what it is. Is there something there or not?
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I've wanted to be an actor for such a long time that I haven't had anything else in my thoughts. I think my family would have quite liked me to be a lawyer.
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I was never supposed to make it to Congress. I was a staff person.
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How long you live is less important than how healthy you are along the way.
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I was interned in Auschwitz for one year. I didn't bring back anything, except for a few jokes, and that filled me with shame. Then again, I didn't know what to do with this fresh experience. For this experience was no literary awakening, no occasion for professional or artistic introspection.
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I've never been that guy who says, 'Ooh, I have to play King Lear'. First off, that'd be a disaster anyway. I tend to read something and see who's involved, and then know I want to be part of it. But I don't think I'm through with comedy. I still love to make people laugh.
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We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves.
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Only those ignorant of what poetry means will ask the question: what is it good for?
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My first job was with an auto plant, Kansas City - they treated you like slaves. From there I went back to Chicago, worked in steel mills, drove a cab, stuff like that.
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I love sitcoms, and I grew up on sitcoms. That's my tasty junk food.
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China needs a powerful Europe, but Europe can only be strong if each and every one of its members attains rapid economic development.
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English people are famous for never speaking out but only saying what they really feel about you behind your back. Americans believe the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. I like exploring those, er, differences in national snippiness.
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Though I am a Catholic, a professing one, I have serious doubts about the survival of the human personality after death.
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I dyed my hair pink when I was fifteen.
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When you're in college, you really don't know where you're going to end up, but you know who you want to be along that journey.
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A filial son to his father can be a traitorous subject to his ruler.
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In the first English class I attended, Prof. E. H. Elliot, addressing me, asked if I really belonged to the Junior B. A. class, and I had to answer him in the affirmative. He then proceeded to inquire how old I was.
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Women are not automatically second-class citizens because they live in Islamic countries. We cannot judge the position of women in Islam aright if we take the most conservative Islamic states as representative of the whole.
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It's a basic tenet you learn at drama school. If you're playing someone evil, you can't make an objective moral judgment. You've got to get inside the character and empathize as much as possible.
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Living here in North America - I have been Americanized. When I go back home now, there are things that I have far less tolerance for in South Africa. We've come such a long way in terms of race relations and the economy as well as people's willingness to move on. There are still a lot of things that are frustrating about being in South Africa.
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In other words, the celebrity gets out of hand, and if you're not careful, you will forget what you are about - and that is you are about making music that people want to hear.
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I think the big lesson I've learned is that it's very hard to write satire in America because almost immediately, whatever you've thought of turns out to come true, or sometimes it already was true.
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The Republican convention, an event with the intellectual content of a Guns'n'Roses lyric attended by every ofay insurance brokerin America who owns a pair of white shoes.
