Patrick O'Brian Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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I think you need brains to do any Shakespeare with any authority. I could do Shakespeare, but not with any authority.
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Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.
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I had just turned 10-years-old when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and plunged America into World War II.
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I liked to play dress-up.
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I'm 68 years old, and I'm as much a criminal now as I was at the age of 22. And, I'm even more of a dissident than I was then.
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I can make them voting machines sing Home Sweet Home.
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Misanthropy is born, I think, out of an almost oppressive sense of loneliness, a conviction that there's no one on earth who understands you. I don't think misanthropes hate people: They hate that people hate them.
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Football matters so much to people, and they get very defensive - or angry.
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The initial spark, your affection for the characters, all those things can disappear. It's a perilous thing.
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I'm not gonna be broke, like my mom was broke, my uncles were broke, my sisters didn't have money, my cousins on down.
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Outcome is simply the final score: Who won the game; what numbers came up in a roll of the dice; how high did a stock go. Outcome is the result, regardless of the method used to achieve it. It is not controllable.
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Working hard is great, being lazy sometimes is great, but failed potential is the worst.
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Feminism is universal. You can't just fight for one type of freedom or one type of female power. You know what? Muslim women want to cover up, and we have to fight for our right to do that, too.
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When I grew up, my family, we sat down, all of us to watch 'Good Times,' 'Sanford and Son,' all those shows that were out at that time.
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Of all the nonsense written about love, none is more absurd than the notion that ideal love is selfless. To love is to see myself in you and to wish to celebrate myself with you. What I love is the embodiment of my values in another person. Love is an act of self-assertion, self-expression and a celebration of being alive.
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All the stories I write come from someone I've met or some anecdote I've heard.
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I have a lot of stuff I want to talk about and offer up. It would be odd not to have ideas about something.
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Bob Hope: Let's not do any jokes we didn't plan on, eh.
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When I asked him -Mr.Henry Ford- if he ever worried, he replied: "No. I believe God is managing affairs and that He doesn't need any advice from me. With God in charge, I believe that every-thing will work out for the best in the end. So what is there to worry about?
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I don't sit down and say I'm going to write a song about this or that. They are never mapped out.
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My personal fascination with the power of the crowd has been growing: Exactly what can a 'crowd' accomplish? We know crowds can raise billions of dollars, create Wikipedia, and even design and build small autonomous drones. But how about something large and complex like designing a new car, and maybe someday even a spaceship?
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I have never had great expectations of my performance or of a film. I try not to think about the outcome. If you look that far ahead, it sort of taints your choices as an actor. I try as hard as I can to believe that no one is ever going to see it and that it's not even a movie. Then you can allow yourself to bare more. Then, once a project is done, I tend to forget about it until it comes out.
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I feel that people who haven't read my books and haven't heard me lecture - who don't in fact know what my work is about - have been very hard on me. There is an expression in Alcoholics Anonymous called "contempt prior to investigation." I feel many people practice contempt prior to investigation.
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'Jack,you have debauched my sloth.'
