Pat Barker Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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The problem is that no ethical system has ever achieved consensus. Ethical systems are completely unlike mathematics or science. This is a source of concern.
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I've never had a study in my life. I'm like Jane Austen - I work on the corner of the dining table.
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I do not have the angst and the anxiety of my youth. I've gotten to a place where I'm very comfortable with who I am.
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There have been weeks when I've not been hydrating properly or not eating properly or training too hard. When I do that, I don't feel good. It has to be the exact formula.
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Acting, and the privilege of being able to do it for a living, is so important to me. I don't turn up and just hope for the best. I really fret about it. I do my homework; I prepare myself for the experience of playing a particular character.
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National partition is a sorrow that touches all Koreans, but for me it is brought to the fore by unimaginable personal suffering.
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If men possessed wisdom, which stands in the same relation to the form of man as the sight to the eye, they would not cause any injury to themselves or to others; for the knowledge of truth removes hatred and quarrels, and prevents mutual injuries.
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I just don't watch a lot of TV.
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I don't like formal gardens. I like wild nature. It's just the wilderness instinct in me, I guess.
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When you go to jail, there's so much simple stuff missing. You just want some good toilet paper or a real toothbrush, a real blanket and a real bed to lay in.
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I sort of understood that when I first started: that you shouldn't repeat a success. Very often you're going to, and maybe the first time you do, it works. And you love it. But then you're trapped.
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I've had a dozen novels published and have made far more than a dozen mistakes. Which is why Randy Susan Meyers and I wrote a guidebook to help authors avoid making our mistakes.
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I don't have the activist temperament. I like listening to divergent points of view and hearing people out. I like getting along. I even like being liked, although activists of any stripe should get rid of that handicap at the outset.
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Gratefulness is a double-edged sword. Because I think we've poured it into a feeling. And the batter of gratitude gets kind of stuck to the edges of the Williams Sonoma melamine mixing bowl. But gratefulness, the act of being grateful is actually... a verb. It's an activity.
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Los Angeles is a really strange place. I grew up there like a normal kid, but it was not until I experienced other parts of the world that I realized how really and truly bizarre to the core it is - inside the homes of the powerful and damaged.
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Saudi had been a very restricted place. Even on the magazines there, if there was a little leg or cleavage showing, they used to blacken it with a black mark. Me and Ishmeet, so many times, had tried to remove the black portion with our spit, but of course, it would never come out.
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Anybody can do a deal. The tough part is doing the deal at the right time, being strategic.
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Unless you consider yourself some sort of human brand, which I don't, you have to deal with the fact that different people are going to like different aspects of your work. It's not consistent. I am not consistent. But I feel OK with that.
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So you have to keep waiting and then they give you the script and it's terrible. Then you have to go to the rewrite and they're very upset because you didn't like it. I went through that for seven years.
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I remember having a conversation with my sister, saying, 'What if I don't make it? What if I'm still waiting tables when I'm 35?' I was just at the end of my rope. But I've been at the end of that rope several times.
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Job-interviewing is just a skill. Like any skill, some people have more of a predisposition for it than others.
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I love Rebel Rebel in Manhattan's West Village for vinyl, but record stores are hard to come by these days. I almost don't even use iTunes. I mostly use music subscription services. But I'll go into Rebel Rebel once a month or so and buy everything I love on vinyl.
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Outlaw consciousness is born the moment I drop out, stop the world, cease being an actor identified with the mythic roles I have been playing in society. Change begins when I do nothing except observe. The wisdom of the railroad crossing: Stop. Look. Listen. Meditation is the healthy form of voyeurism.
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Culturally, the First World War is the war that stands in for other wars.
