P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
My wife and I both come from Irish families. There are two kinds of Irish families: the hitting kind and the kidding kind. If you're fortunate - and both of us are - you come from the kidding kind of Irish family.
Quotes to Explore
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I've always had better luck learning things on my own. And I really love the challenge of doing it yourself and kind of being alone against the system.
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To me, presentations are the most powerful device. You can't really name a movement that didn't start with the spoken word.
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I could sum up the future in one word, and that word is 'boring.' The future is going to be boring.
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In Sweden, they broadcast the American shows in English with Swedish subtitles, whereas in many European countries they dub them. Watching those shows in English was big for me.
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It is the end. But of what? The end of France? No. The end of kings? Yes.
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I view myself primarily as a trial lawyer who happens to be writing, as opposed to a writer who happens to be a trial lawyer, so the audience is like a jury to me.
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Music was your real passion, this thing you held dear even above family. It was this relationship that never betrayed you. Once it became your job - this thing that was highly visible, this thing that became about commerce - that's when you were holding onto music like it was a palm tree in a hurricane.
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Here in France, I've seen some very good young designers, but they don't have this ability to be good businessmen, too. I think America gives you this.
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As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.
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Human nature is above all things lazy.
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No one can make me work harder than I do, so I'm generally not interested in who I am competing with.
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Our founders said that everybody mattered, everybody counted. But we all know that they didn't count everybody at the beginning. They did somehow have confidence that each generation of Americans would do a better job with it and would bring more and more people in from the margins and into the heart and soul of our democracy.
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Skateboarding was everything to us growing up. It changes the way you see the world: you spend all day looking for ditches.
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When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.
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Certainly, poverty and economic decline have a lot to do with the so-called rage of Islam. You've got all these young men in countries which are economically in bad shape. The idea that they might be able to make a good living and get married and have a family, a decent life, seems very remote to a lot of people in a lot of the world.
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Keeping your space clean is as much a part of the end result as the dish being tasty.
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I love comic books and I love anime.
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Music is like my security blanket.
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I'm a mixture of Anglo-Saxon, a bit of Spanish and one-eighth American. I've often wondered if I have an Asiatic ancestor from the East as well because I have deep-set eyes. Make-up artists are constantly trying to shade my eyelids, and I have to point out that I don't have any!
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I was born and brought up in Chennai, as the entire Telugu film industry was based there.
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To me, the technique was almost irrelevant; it was what was coming across.
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I started to watch 'Play for Today' and plays like 'Cathy Come Home,' and Kenneth Branagh's 'Billy' trilogy in the 1980s, which took us into the world of the Belfast family. As a kid in Luton, how was I ever going to know that world otherwise?
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In the middle classes the gifted son of a family is always the poorest-usually a writer or artist with no sense for speculation-and in a family of peasants, where the average comfort is just over penury, the gifted son sinks also, and is soon a tramp on the roadside.
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My wife and I both come from Irish families. There are two kinds of Irish families: the hitting kind and the kidding kind. If you're fortunate - and both of us are - you come from the kidding kind of Irish family.
