Past Quotes
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It just seemed like all the records I have made since Creedence Clearwater Revival have all been sort of pushed off center. I felt like I was dancing around the outskirts of what is my true center. With this album, I really wanted to stay on the mark, right in the middle, right where rock 'n' roll is. I wanted this one to be easier, a lot more fun than some of the past records have been.
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In the West, we avoid painful encounters with art by trivialising it, or by familiarising it. Our present obsession with the past has the double advantage of making new work seem raw and rough compared to the cosy patina of tradition, whilst refusing tradition its vital connection to what is happening now.
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Liberals in Congress have spent the past three decades pandering to environmental extremists. The policies they have put in place are in large part responsible for the energy crunch we are seeing today. We have not built a refinery in this country for 30 years.
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Honestly, I don't focus on what my writing is called. I don't mean to sound artsy and pretentious, I just really can't think of things in that way. For me, the point is telling a story that keeps people up past bedtime, while hopefully exploring ideas that resonate.
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You never want to think the best things are in the past. You want to get yourself to believe that the best things are going to be in the future.
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Everything felt more personal this time. I go back to songs we've done in the past and there's just more maturity, depth, intelligence on these. They just feel more grown-up.
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Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future.
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The experience you’ve had may be unwanted, may amount to nothing but damage and waste, but experience has substance, is factual, authoritative, lives on in your past and affects your present, whatever you attempt to do about it.
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Hooking up with anybody from your past gets you thinking about things you haven't thought about in a while. It can rekindle dreams.
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There is no life for girls in team sports past Little League. I got into tennis when I realized this, and because I thought golf would be too slow for me, and I was too scared to swim.
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I could open a thousand Excel documents and still never think to scroll past a wall of empty rows to see if, hidden beneath them, there is a tab I need to click. Just doesn't occur to me. Because, design.
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I don't want to look back-I want to keep looking ahead. I'd hate for my defining moment to be my past.
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I think that I would really like at first for the art to speak for itself. I don't see the need for a lot of personal information about my past or who I am. I would rather the personal side of it just be in the concepts and the genuine feelings that I filter through my work. I know that it's inevitable that people can find whatever they want about me. Once I've had a chance to create a language and a world with my art, then I'm more comfortable sharing that information.
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I don't think writers change the past any more than other people do, except in so far as we may mine our lives and change things for fictional use.
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The South is full of memories and ghosts of the past. For me, it is the most inspiring place to write, from William Faulkner's haunted antebellum home to the banks of the Mississippi to the wind that whispers through the cotton fields.
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Being scared is really a good thing. It's being scared of being scared that's bad. Being scared of walking through your fear, going to a place of true creativity - that's what an artist is, that's what he does. If you do that, then being inspired by your contemporaries or people from the past is really great.
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The belief that we can be done with our past is a myth.
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Writing about carrying the past on your back is a manifestation of my Irishness, because we go on and on and will for another two or three generations.
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Whenever I've been stuck on a project, it's always brought me solace to the return to books that moved me in the past. It's a nice way to get outside my own head; and it brings me back to one of the most important reasons I write at all: to bring some pleasure to readers, to make them think or feel.
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It is going to be an experiment of how it works, and I see I have all reasons to believe that it will work fine. But it's a short time. And we also have pushed the envelope here a little beyond what has been done in the past.
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When you smoke marijuana, you are in the moment and you are happy. You forget about any worries of the past or the future.
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To me there is no past or future in my art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was.
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If you were on a desert island and you could only bring along five records from the past five years, what records would you bring?
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I feel like I've started a new chapter in my life, and I need to leave the past behind.
