Clive Sinclair Quotes
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I'll tell you now that I hate myself for many reasons, but being Jewish is not one of them.
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I'm completely lacking any sense of religious belief, but I am superstitious.
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I had a Latin master who, for no rational reason whatsoever - I was a very quiet kid at school - just hated me.
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I can't go to bed with John Wayne, so I do the next best thing: I go to bed with my girlfriend, who once met the great man. That's how much I love westerns.
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My own zigzag path through life led me back to Santa Cruz in the early Eighties, and I have revisited regularly since. The place hasn't changed: head in the clouds, backside on the hills and feet in the ocean - one of the most decent and beautiful places on earth.
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In the 1880s, a weedy Easterner named Owen Wister had something like a nervous breakdown. Wyoming, with its wide-open spaces and healthy pursuits, was prescribed as a cure. Wister was immediately smitten by the taciturn cowboys and the rules imposed upon them by the cattle barons.
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Santa Cruz is blessed not only with natural wonders, but also with gifted souls who can fashion nature's bounty into man-made treasures.
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I went to UC Santa Cruz, overlooking the Bay of Monterey and Santa Cruz, in 1969. Back then, the city was part-hippie, part-surfer, but mostly retired chicken farmer.
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My history was the Western. I grew up with the Lone Ranger, the Cisco Kid and Bonanza. I felt as much a child of the West as someone born in Montana or Wyoming.
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Deadwood lies at the northern tip of the Black Hills, where the land is ancient and rubbed smooth by time. The Black Hills are more rugged at their southern extremity, where bare granite forms pinnacles and spires.
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I still see the world as a place of bitter irony and black humour, failed hopes, dashed plans. I hope to make my work sparer, to outgrow my desire to show off.
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Many years ago, when I lived in the mini-Siberia they call East Anglia, I was awakened in the early hours by the sound of a pantechnicon being loaded. Peeping through the curtains, I observed the grocer doing a runner with all his chattels and his family.
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Hinde Esther Kreitman is a forgotten literary foremother, her works largely lost, ignored and out of print.
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As Annie Proulx is to Wyoming, so is Jane Candia Coleman to Arizona.
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You have to turn a blind eye to politics in nearly all Westerns.
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Every year in late June, Custer's Last Stand is reenacted on the high plains of Montana. When Custer led out the 7th Cavalry in 2003 - the year I witnessed it - the audience stood and cheered with turbo-charged patriotism.
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When I was growing up in north-west London, our milkman's cart was pulled by a horse, and cattle still grazed on the meadows near Church Farm.
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Of course the 19th century remained in blissful ignorance of post-modern irony, and the dime novels were made without end.
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Heinrich Heine once imagined the exiled Israelite as a dog who regains his stolen manhood only when he embraces the Sabbath bride. I see western swing performing a similar function in hardscrabble Texas, turning dirt-poor hired hands into Dapper Dans with magic feet at the Saturday night hoe-down.
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Copywriting cuts the communication cord between word and feeling. By offering instant gratification, it atrophies more subtle emotions.
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It would be a big mistake to think that Chekhov was a natural, that he did not have to work for his effects and singular style.
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Hinde Esther Singer was born in Poland on March 31, 1881, the daughter of Bathsheva and Pinchos Mendel Singer. Bathsheva was an intellectual, but both Bathsheva's father and her husband disapproved of erudite women.
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As I was writing, I realised I wasn't sufficiently extrovert to gather enough interesting souls with tall tales around me. I was no Louis Theroux. But neither was I interested in exploring my inner life in public, in the manner of a Jonathan Raban.
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The idea of the split personality is as old as Genesis. For a start, Eve was manufactured from Adam's rib. Then there's Cain and Abel, twins at war. They were followed by Esau and Jacob, likewise divisible into hairy and smooth types.