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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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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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 started writing movie scripts. They excited me a lot, but I didn't like them when they were finished because they were simple copies of the films I saw in childhood.
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My marks were always bad, and I was a bad influence on other children, so they would explain to my mother that they could retain me only by being partial towards me, and so I should offer to leave the school myself. I would barely get 40-50% and was also extremely naughty.
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When I saw the first I couldn't believe I was in another great movie that would be made into a trilogy. This movie is quite visible and I think it will stand the test of time. I think kids and parents will love this movie for a long time.
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In a world where people are hungry for quick fixes and sound bites, for instant gratification, there's no patience for the long, slow rebuilding process: implementing after-school programs, hiring more community workers to act as mentors, adding more job training programs in marginalized areas.
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I've always been a fan of Saint Laurent because I like how their jeans fit on me, but as far as high fashion, I don't wear too much high fashion. I like more streetwear and baggier stuff.
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I never did drama at school. I did it for one term, when it was compulsory, and I hated it. Tennis was the main thing in my life, and I was not open to anything else. When I removed tennis from the equation, I didn't know who I was.
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I wasn't creative enough to imagine my first novel becoming a film directed by Alexander Payne. Nor did I consider the possibility of seeing Hollywood stars moving through my personal version of Hanalei town: going to Tahiti Nui, rehearsing a scene in front of my cousin's cottages, driving the snaky roads.
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I usually eat in my friend Tom Corcoran's place - the Siam Thai in Monkstown. I go there for a very large plate of beef in red wine sauce.
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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.