Kevin Barry Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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I think I'm a lot like other moms out there who feel like if we don't have the pecan pie we have every year, then it just won't be Christmas.
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I think all politicians lie.
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I'll tell you why I like writing: it's just jumping into a pool. I get myself into a kind of trance. I engage the world, but it's also wonderful to just escape. I try to find the purities out of the confusion. It's pretty old-fashioned, but it's fun.
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There's so much that I can give as a human being - and I know that.
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I don't say I was 'proceeding down a thoroughfare;' I say I 'walked down the road'. I don't say I 'passed a hallowed institute of learning;' I say I 'passed a school'.
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I don't think it's possible to separate out the strands of a writer's history, circumstances, life events, and that writer's themes.
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In my previous career as a chief executive of high-tech companies, I experienced firsthand the endless possibilities when people from diverse backgrounds work together. They get to know one another and quickly learn that they share more in common than they originally thought.
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A big reason I'd spent my career as a writer and not a public speaker is that I am a person who refines my worldview in a silent room, waiting for my thoughts to arrange themselves on the screen before me.
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The happiest part of a man's life is what he passes lying awake in bed in the morning.
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I spend several years trying to get inside the brain and heart of my subjects, listening to the interior monologues in their letters, and when I have to bridge the chasms between the factual evidence, I try to make an intuitive leap through the eyes and motivation of the person I'm writing about.
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Every major technological step forward has profoundly changed human society - that's how we know they're major, even if we don't always realise it at the time. Farming created cities. Writing, followed eventually by printing, vastly increased the preservation and transmission of cultural information across time and space.
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There is scarcely anything that drags a person down like debt.
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Judi Dench and Ian McKellen taught me how to work hard and respect the theatre.
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We have a human rights interest. Then there is the immigration problem. The human-rights violations have caused people to take to boats and flood not only the United States, but other countries in the region, creating great instability.
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Wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority.
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Some moments before you are aware of what you will do next - a time in which you subjectively appear to have complete freedom to behave however you please - your brain has already determined what you will do. You then become conscious of this 'decision' and believe that you are in the process of making it.
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Aurora had but newly chased the night,And purpled o'er the sky with blushing light.
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There can be only one permanent revolution - a moral one; the regeneration of the inner man. How is this revolution to take place? Nobody knows how it will take place in humanity, but every man feels it clearly in himself. And yet in our world everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself.
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I am truly happy with what I've got. But if I could alter something, it would be my hands. I've never been satisfied with them - I would love longer fingers.
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I'm a healthy eater. In the morning, I'll have hot water and lemon, then scrambled eggs. I eat spelt or rye bread, not wheat, and have lots of veg and salad.
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You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.
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When a new truth enters the world, the first stage of reaction to it is ridicule, the second stage is violent opposition, and in the third stage, that truth comes to be regarded as self-evident.
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I miss journalism an awful lot.
