Brian Wilson Quotes
I meditate and I also think about meditation. Which is funny. I think about Maharishi, about just the idea of meditating. It gives me something.
Quotes to Explore
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I like Michael Moore, but I think of him more as a rabble-rouser. On his TV show, when he went to the home of the guy who invented the car alarm and set off all the car alarms on the block... pretty funny.
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I don't have the looks to compete at a bar, and I'm not that funny. So the last thing I want is to be in a situation where that's what I'm competing on. I'd rather be on OkCupid or Match, where I can write a 300-word essay about myself that's really good.
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I wish the government would put a tax on pianos for the incompetent.
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For me, I can't watch violence when it's too grotesque, and it's just like, that's revolting to watch. I don't enjoy it. But when it's a Tarantino film, I'm lining up outside the door to see it, and I'm expecting to see something really crazy, a lot of blood, and for it to be funny.
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There are a few dogmas and double standards and really regrettable exports from philosophy that have confounded the thinking of scientists on the subject of morality.
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I enjoy it too much - even if I knew I'd never get a book published, I would still write. I enjoy the experience of getting thoughts and ideas and plots and characters organised into this narrative framework.
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Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.
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Giving people self-confidence is by far the most important thing that I can do. Because then they will act.
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Being a humorist is not a voluntary thing. You can tell this because in a situation where saying a funny thing will cause a lot of trouble, a humorist will still say the funny thing. No matter how inappropriate.
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There are hundreds of books about Woodrow Wilson, but I have an image of him in my mind that is unlike any picture I have seen anywhere else, based on material at Princeton and 35 years of researching and thinking about him.
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The more one forgets himself - by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love - the more human he is.
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I think of the past and the future as well as the present to determine where I am, and I move on while thinking of these things.
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But it's like the horror of being in a studio with a blank canvas. I used to always run out of ideas because there are so many possibilities and I would just think, well what am I going to do now!
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There was no Internet, not even many cookbooks except the old reference books. So we would sit down at night, a group of six chefs, and we'd exchange recipes and each talk about how we were doing things. It was the only way to learn new ideas.
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I don't know David Cameron very well. I like him. I think you can judge a book by its cover - whoever said you can't is wrong - that's the whole point of nature giving us intuition, instinct and so on. I think the cover is pretty good.
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I keep thinking, we teach children to use language to solve their disputes. We teach them not to hit and fight and bite. Then look what adults do!
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When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.
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I think if you're trying to be funny, sometimes you're bending a piece of metal in a direction it doesn't want to go. And sometimes comedy just needs to find itself.
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A lot of modern comedies are difficult to watch too, because they're so ironic and so detached and so quote-unquote clever. They kind of keep you at arm's length. They can be really funny, but they're not really nourishing.
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Kind of the exhausting thing about doing pure comedy, or something that's broader, is you're kind of a slave to the laugh. If it's not funny, then there's not much point in doing it. The kind of ueber-objective is to make people laugh. You always have to have that in the back of your mind, 'Eh, I've got to figure out a way to make this funny.'
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Artists who approach perfection do not have many ideas.
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I am more interested in revolutionary beauty than in the great beauty, to be honest. Italian cinema is now mostly a bureau for tourism. We have given up that revolution of the contemporary.
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I meditate and I also think about meditation. Which is funny. I think about Maharishi, about just the idea of meditating. It gives me something.
