Alaya Dawn Johnson Quotes
The old fiction room at my high school was a small box of wonders, and no matter how long I spent investigating its seven and a half overstuffed shelves, I never stopped discovering treasures.

Quotes to Explore
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You're dealing with all these foreign agents, foreign brushes, and different time zones. So, you have to put just as much work into taking that makeup off as you do into putting it on.
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I think of Twitter as the place where I go to have a great conversation when I can't have one locally, which seems to be all the time, and the more time that I spend on Twitter, the more I sort of curate this incredible group of very intelligent people that I just get to know purely through the quality of their thoughts.
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Never hire someone who knows less than you do about what he's hired to do.
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We must stop the trend of closing schools and building prisons.
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I've been things and seen places.
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Teach For America would not be able to continue recruiting and developing an ever-more diverse and impactful group of corps members and alumni if the nation's leading colleges become even less diverse.
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Bad ballplayers make good managers.
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The influence of blogging is overall a very positive force in the media.
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I didn't want to spend the next thirty years writing about bad things happening in the same small town - not least of all because people would begin to wonder why anyone still lives there!
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Curtain! Fast music! Light! Ready for the last finale! Great! The show looks good, the show looks good!
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The first time I worked with colors was by making these mosaics of Pantone swatches. They end up being very large pictures, and I photographed with a very large camera - an 8x10 camera. So you can see the surface of every single swatch - like in this picture of Chuck Close. And you have to walk very far to be able to see it.
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I had an excellent math and physics teacher in high school named T.C. Patel, and in the university, I had truly dedicated professors in both physics and mathematics who gave me a sound foundation with which to pursue graduate studies.
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Happiness is knowing and appreciating what you've got. I am very, very, very grateful for what, to me, is dead easy.
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I didn't have a role model. My role model was Michael Jordan. Bad role model for an Indian dude... I didn't have anyone who looked like me. And by the time I was old enough to have what could have been a role model, they were my peers. Aziz Ansari is my peer. Kal Penn is my peer.
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My business issues are just that - business - and I deal with them like they are business.
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I think part of what I love about being an actor is getting to take on different worlds and investigate different genres and travel to different lands.
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I use the setting of a small rural Norwegian community - the kind of place that I know so intimately. I could never write a novel set in a big city, because, frankly, I don't know what it would be like.
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Contrary to what many Westerners believe, Islam has a rich tradition of secular painting in spite of its ban on images. It is only in religious rituals that the use of pictorial representation is totally prohibited.
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I think it's always interesting to learn what the seemingly spontaneous one-nighter actually reveals about a character.
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The way they taught history in schools was not appealing. They stressed wars and dates. They left the people out. I was attracted to history by the need to know about the people. In China, I went to a British school, and we just learned about kings and queens. Back in America, I had the regular social studies curriculum.
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Music has always felt very real to me.
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You know the actor John Garfield? In one movie he walked up to this train station, the ticket booth, and the guy says, 'Yes, where are you going?' And he says, 'I want a ticket to nowhere.' I thought: that's it. The freedom to do that. I want a ticket to nowhere.
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I don't fight for the money. I fight for my legacy. I fight for history. I fight for my people.
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The old fiction room at my high school was a small box of wonders, and no matter how long I spent investigating its seven and a half overstuffed shelves, I never stopped discovering treasures.