Ben Fountain Quotes
The main thing about writing is... writing. Sitting your butt down in the chair and doing the work.
Quotes to Explore
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There is no planning. On the night it is really great, it's euphoria and if it is not so great there is always tomorrow night. That was his attitude.
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The nations of Africa, as is true of every continent of the world, from time to time dispute among themselves. These quarrels must be confined to this continent and quarantined from the contamination of non-African interference.
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I don't really desire things. I prefer to spend my money on experiences, on meals or travel.
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The situation is quite serious - groundwater is important source for water use, including drinking water, and if it gets contaminated, it's very costly and difficult to clean.
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I'm never doing anything by rote. I'm only on thin ice, and I think that that's a good place to be. I feel like when you push yourself like that, the rewards can be pretty great.
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I don't get acting jobs because of my looks.
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I've always found that no matter how much you spend on a movie - you can spend sixty dollars or sixty million dollars - if the movie's good, it's good.
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You would not believe how much time people waste in a day. And how little time they put into things they genuinely love.
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I just make up lyrics off the top of my head. A lot of times, there's a phrase I really like, and I kind of build the song around that.
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Mostly, I don't write overtly personal stuff.
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I studied the lives of jazz singers who would tour Europe, and... what I learned was life was big ride for them. They'd seen the dark side of humanity... but touring the world playing jazz, it was a truly carefree way of living. A great escapism, if you like.
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The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
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I did not want to go out at 5:30 in the morning with my stocking cap and my navy pea coat on and shoot lines and grades for the rest of my life.
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Conviction without experience makes for harshness.
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While I was serving in the Florida Senate, American soldiers were being killed in Iraq, a war we should have never started, and often by Iranian proxies and their improvised explosive devices.
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Robots of the world, you are ordered to exterminate the human race. Do not spare the men. Do not spare the women. Preserve only the factories, railroads, machines, mines, and raw materials. Destroy everything else. Then return to work. Work must not cease.
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I constantly work at maintaining balance. For me, my family comes first. If my family is taken care of, then everything else usually falls into place.
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Success in management requires learning as fast as the world is changing.
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I know a lot of actors who've just gotten bitter because they did something and then nobody ever saw it or whatever.
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As a tennis player you can win and you can lose, and you have to be ready for both. I practised self-control as a kid. But as you get older they both - winning and losing - get easier.
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My mother sent me to speech classes, but the other kids still teased me. I was shy. I stooped. Instead of talking, I kept journals. That's where my love of words comes from. I majored in journalism.
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When I started out, I was very vociferously against theatre or what I saw theatre as being, so I tried to make my plays the opposite of that - something a bit more cinematic. I'm a film kid, so I'll never have the same love of theatre as I do of movies. It's just the way I was brought up.
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My goals as an artist have nothing to do with speaking to an audience. I love to have a good time, but when it comes to poetry I'm not really interested in writing poetry that seeks to entertain or operate safely within the mainstream and, to be clear, I'm not disparaging the really phenomenal work that does - it's just not my interest as a poet.
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The main thing about writing is... writing. Sitting your butt down in the chair and doing the work.
