Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Stories about mental aberration and oddity only make sense in context. Just how do people live with someone who is peculiar, gifted, strange or alien? It's odd because there's a little part of me that wants to write about exotic, strange bizarre subjects. Instead, I've rather reluctantly realised that what I write about is families.
My room is like an antique shop, full of junk, and weird stuff. There's a big sword in there. And a taxidermy bird, and a couple of birdcages. And a lot of newspaper cuttings. I used to have a weird thing about cutting out morbid headlines from newspapers, and collecting them. I was fascinated with drowning, which is kind of strange.
It's a very, very interesting experience to be talking to people who are such icons in their own right. When Adele came to a show, I was just talking to her, and at the time, I thought, 'I'm just having a chat with somebody.' But then I heard myself say, 'Oh, I was talking to Adele the other day,' and it's as strange as you'd imagine.
Indeed, when God's glory dwells in me, there is nothing too far away, nothing too painful, nothing too strange or too familiar that it cannot contain and renew by its touch. Every time I recognize the glory of God in me and give it space to manifest itself to me, all that is human can be brought there and nothing will be the same again.
It's what is strange about doing a job that is also the thing you love, the thing you feel passionate about. People get to the point where they're burned out and disillusioned by the whole thing because when things aren't going well at work it also means they aren't going well in your heart, in your soul. They're all wrapped up together.
The movies I like watching the most are these sort of cinema verite, handheld films where you really get gritty with people. But I also have this strange affinity for old Rock Hudson/Doris Day movies and things that sort of pop out where you see the frames, where you have these 2D animation moments and split-screens and things like that.
I wrote for years before I was ever published, and I don't think I could ever stop. That said, I was also a veterinarian before I sold my first book, and I still volunteer my time to help with animal welfare causes. So that is a career I would be happy to return to - while still secretly writing strange stories back in my doctor's office.
As a Scot, I instinctively feel a sympathy towards a culture which is based on generosity. It's very refreshing. Afghans think they're the best people in the world and their country is the best place in the world, and it's strange because you go there and it doesn't really look like it, and yet they assume that everybody else envies them.
I remember being at school during morning meeting and looking around at everybody, 350 kids, saying a prayer. We're all very young and no one knows what it means, and I remember feeling strange that people were just repeating words that they didn't understand. I refused to participate. For some reason I always rejected it, but respectfully.
From my earliest youth I've been riddled with angst about the homogeneity of the world and have tried to do things to break it: attacking abercrombie & fitch in the mall with a plunger, posting strange statues made of garbage around my town, different kinds of interventions, parades and experiments. I've always cared a lot about difference.
Funny enough, if you are looking at people these days who are putting Botox in their face and getting all sorts of plastic surgery, we look at them and go, I can tell you've had Botox. I can tell you've had plastic surgery. You look really strange to me. But no one's saying anything. We're just accepting the fact that they're strange-looking.
When you realize that you have a little germ of an idea that has - I suppose I can only say, has to me - a little taste of magic to it. You have this idea that there are millions, literally, of people listening to it at the same time as you and that little strange telepathy of a feeling that you're sharing something live with all those people.
Darren Campbell, the British Olympic sprinter, was my sprint coach at Middlesbrough - yet the best advice he gave me was to slow down. That might sound strange but he said: 'You have too much speed - you don't always need to run at 100 per cent.' I was used to running flat out every time, but he told me, 'You know how quick you are, slow down.'
George Wallace for some strange, unknown reason, he liked me. George Wallace came down to Florida, and he went all over Florida, and he said to the people, 'If you all can't vote for me, don't vote for those oval-headed lizards. Vote for Shirley Chisholm!' And that crashed my votes, because they thought that I was in league with him to get votes.
I was having a conversation with one of my teammates and she asked me, "Aren't you so glad it's over? We don't have to compete anymore." I thought that was a strange comment but in that moment I realized that I was doing it for the right reasons. I wasn't looking at the Olympics to define me. I wasn't to arrive somewhere by performing well in a contest.
I'm certainly very influenced by what you would call "contemporary headline horror," stuff that is true crime or for one reason or another catches our attention in the media, those strange cases that we end up obsessing about. I'm always influenced by weird anecdotes and news. And, you know, lastly, probably things that have happened to me in my own life.
Yet how strange a thing is the beauty of music! The brief beauty that the player brings into being transforms a given period of time into pure continuance; it is certain never to be repeated; like the existence of dayflies and other such short-lived creatures, beauty is a perfect abstraction and creation of life itself. Nothing is so similar to life as music.
And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight-- isn't that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you're less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn't it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you've experienced before?
One cannot really know an other without intimacy. Detached, objective observations alone leave a surface upon which it is too easy to project one's own image or fantasies. In intimacy, one respectfully interacts with the other, invites the penetration of the other, enters into a common effort, and then the strange and distinct contours of self and other become more apparent.
At this point, I don't care much where I live. I don't feel as attached to Russia's native woods as I was once. I used to dearly love Moscow, even though I wasn't born there; but now, it's changed so much that it's a strange city for me. I had a bond with my friends, but most of them are gone; I haven't made new ones, and the ones that I do have are mostly in Germany and in America.
The thing with America is that... however you want to denigrate them for being crass or whatever, with a film that they like and think is well written, well-made and is popular, they actually want to work with those people and want to follow that, whereas I've had nothing coming in from the UK... nothing at all. Whether that sums up the state of the industry now, I don't know. But it's strange.
When the most learned evolutionists can give neither the how nor the why, the marvels seem to show that adaptation is inexplicable. Yet those who cannot explain it will not admit that it is inexplicable. This is a strange situation, only partly ascribable to the rather unscientific conviction that evidence will be found in the future. It is due to a psychological quirk [in the minds of its advocates].
I'm finding things out about myself as a person - as a writer - as I write, and so are the people who listen to what I do. But they have this additional aspect of how they take the stuff that I do, and so it broadens the work and it creates this strange connection. It's really a way of strangers communicating through this third thing, which is a body of work. But really, I know it's a cliché to say I write for myself, but I write for myself.
I'm really interested in the United States, what it means to be American - maybe because my father's an immigrant and my grandparents were immigrants, and also because I grew up so isolated from mainstream life, and it was such a total shock to leave the commune and, in a way, enter America for the first time when I was eleven - so I've always felt a little like an anthropologist - like, what is this strange place I find myself in, what are the rules here?
My favorite phrase, that a friend of mine who worked on the Potter films and was a lot older than me would use in front of me, and I picked up from him many great phrases - the English have a lot of great idioms for sweating. I don't know why that is. But that's what we do. I feel like it's particularly our country; probably everywhere has a lot of idioms for sweating. He always said, "I'm sweating like a glassblower's asshole," which I always found an incredibly strange and yet vivid image.
Donald Trump gives the impression that he would like to govern by decree. He has that impulse in him and he wants to be a savior, so he says, in his famous phrase, "Only I can fix it!" That's a strange and weird statement for anybody to make, but it's central to Trump's sense of self and self-presentation. And I think that has a lot to do with his identification with dictators. No matter how many they kill and no matter what else they do, they have this capacity to rule by decree without any interference by legislators or courts.
The Ramones were a great bunch of guys. They were very quiet, very shy. They were a little in awe of the filmmaking process, probably because we started at 7 a.m. I do remember the very first day of shooting, I met them and did the scene in the bedroom where Joey sings to me, and they were all scattered around my bedroom in my little fantasy scene. That was the first scene we shot of the movie. That scene is kind of a strange way to start a movie. "Okay, get undressed, and these weird guys in leather jackets and ripped jeans are going to sing to you."
I do believe in the myth of San Francisco and there is a force, a magical kind of thing there. That feeling of like, I've never been to another place like it. It doesn't even feel Californian. Even how it's laid out physically, it's very strange. Like, the weather patterns don't make sense. They do scientifically, but in a practical way it doesn't make any sense. And that weirdness, it really creates some weird thing in the air. But it is you know, on a practical level, it's very expensive, and it's a very business-oriented place, too, and there's a lot of that stuff going on.
