Colson Whitehead Quotes

Quotes to Explore

• I don't understand it. Jack will spend any amount of money to buy votes but he balks at investing a thousand dollars in a beautiful painting.

  

  Jackie Kennedy
  • Money
  • Art
  • Beautiful

• If I started worrying about how my constituents are going to react to every move I make, I wouldn't be able to do my job here. I'll do what I think is right and explain it later.

  

  Ed Harris
  • Job
  • Think
  • Right

• Architecture is my work, and I've spent my whole life at a drawing board, but life is more important than architecture. What matters is to improve human beings.

  

  Oscar Niemeyer
  • Life
  • Work
  • Important

• The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.

  

  H. L. Mencken
  • Man
  • Fear
  • Safety

• I don't think what I look like is relevant.

  

  Fiona Apple
  • Think
  • Like
  • Look

• As an actress, I think it's important to look back and realize that we aren't always quite as original as we think we are. There's this grand, textured history for us over the last 100 years of incredible writers, directors, and performers.

  

  Natalie Dormer
  • Important
  • History
  • Think

• I have a song about being in love. I have a song about being supportive. There's inspiring ones, and there's some that show a little bit more fun and daring. It really is a range of who I am.

  

  Rachel Platten
  • Fun
  • Song
  • Inspiring

• Before I was 5, I did have a lot of time on my hands. I had no job and really no career, and I spent an awful lot of time listening to records. It was more the classical ones, really - Prokofiev, and I think there was some Mozart in there, and more impressionistic composers like Delius.

  

  Wallace Shawn
  • Time
  • Job
  • Career

• I think punditry serves no purpose.

  

  Nate Silver
  • Think
  • Purpose
  • I Think

• The president has been more than willing to challenge the National Rifle Association, but that is like a Republican president standing up to labor unions - not a move that risks anything with his core supporters. Mr. Obama could show some real bravery by taking on Hollywood.

  

  Brown Campbell
  • Up
  • Real
  • Challenge

• Honestly, I try and stay away from what's been written about me, because if you let that stuff get to you and it's not true it can drive you crazy. One thing that I have heard recently which is not true, I didn't say it, is that I believe I was quote saying 'I will never take my shirt off for a movie again.' I didn't say that.

  

  Taylor Lautner
  • Believe
  • True
  • Crazy

• The difference between brown and white rice is that the former is not milled. With the outer bran and germ intact, the rice is therefore chewier and nuttier.

  

  Yotam Ottolenghi
  • Difference
  • White
  • Rice

• I'd like to explore the more abstract side of people's minds, as opposed to the usual sitcom stuff. I don't want to do the typical sitcom-type humor. I'd want to do stuff like go bowling with pineapples.

  

  Harland Williams
  • People
  • Humor
  • Explore

• Coffee shops are everywhere, especially in Los Angeles, chock full of sad sacks desperate to make sure their screenplays make it into the right hands... or any hands, for that matter. The one thing that makes a coffee shop truly great, though, is charm.

  

  Nate Corddry
  • Great
  • Sad
  • Coffee

• 'Hard Times' does not romanticize the Depression, but at least a few of Mr. Terkel's subjects managed to find silver linings.

  

  Adam Cohen
  • Find
  • Depression
  • Silver

• I never lie to my fans.

  

  Becky G
  • Never
  • Fans
  • Lie

• New York felt to me like what America should be - a representation of the world in this small pocket.

  

  Eddie Huang
  • World
  • America
  • Small

• These days, the scientific community accepts me. But getting to that point was tremendously hard, and I think it required a big perception shift. When people have dedicated their lives to something - and spent eight years in college - they just expect that a kid wouldn't be up to doing it.

  

  Taylor Wilson
  • People
  • Up
  • Community

• I was born in East Germany, before the wall came down. We sort of escaped, I guess. I grew up all over the place. Germany, London, back and forth between Minnesota and Germany. I was sort of an army brat, but not in the army.

  

  Falk Hentschel
  • Up
  • Wall
  • Army

• 'Damages' was cool. It brought me back to New York for a little while, so that was a lot of fun, and I was obviously very excited about the opportunity to work with Rose Byrne and Glenn Close. I'd been a fan of that show before I started working on it.

  

  Bailey Chase
  • Work
  • Fun
  • Opportunity

• Samuel Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot,' billed as 'the laugh sensation of two continents,' made its American debut at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, in Miami, Florida, in 1956. My father, Bert Lahr, was playing Estragon, one of the two bowler-hatted tramps who pass the time in a lunar landscape as they wait in vain for the arrival of a Mr. Godot.

  

  John Lahr
  • Time
  • American
  • Father

• In a world in which men write thousands of books and one million scientific papers a year, the mythic bricoleur is the man who plays with all that information and hears a music inside the noise.

  

  William Irwin Thompson
  • World
  • Men
  • Writing

• The Declaration of Independence is that sacred American text so full of meaning and purpose and yet quite empty if you examine it and pull it apart because the words 'All Men' exclude a vast number of citizens.

  Colson Whitehead
  • Men
  • American
  • Words