Stay focused, and stay away from unknown females.
Wisdom from Ron Artest, profiled in Say Queensbridge: Ron Artest Is An NBA Champion, And It All Makes Sense Now.
Tag: quotes
Whenever an artist has been able to say, “I came, I saw, I conquered,” it has been at the end of patient practice. Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.
The need to diet, which we know so well in relation to food, and which runs so contrary to our natural impulses, should be brought to bear on what we now have to relearn in relation to knowledge, people, and ideas. Our minds, no less than our bodies, require periods of fasting.
Alain de Botton, “On Distraction” (via austinkleon)
Movie directors, or should I say people who create things, are very greedy and they can never be satisfied, … That’s why they can keep on working. I’ve been able to work for so long because I think next time, I’ll make something good.
I actually dance pretty awkwardly so I would love to be in a sexy dance band that made other people dance in sexy ways – that would be awesome.
I’m a typical American. Half of me is dying to give myself away, and the other half is continually rebelling.
David Foster Wallace in the 1996 profile in Details magazine.
Money is like gasoline during a road trip. You don’t want to run out of gas on your trip, but you’re not doing a tour of gas stations. You have to pay attention to money, but it shouldn’t be about the money.
It seems to me that making escapist films might be a better service to people than making intellectual ones and making films that deal with issues. It might be better to just make escapist comedies that don’t touch on any issues. The people just get a cool lemonade, and then they go out refreshed, they enjoy themselves, they forget how awful things are and it helps them—it strengthens them to get through the day. So I feel humor is important for those two reasons: that it is a little bit of refreshment like music, and that women have told me over the years that it is very, very important to them.
AllHipHop.com: With “Shooters,” did you hear the original version by Robin Thicke and just wanted to redo it?
Lil’ Wayne: Yeah, hell yeah. I heard it years ago, on his album.
AllHipHop.com: Do you think that would surprise people, like, “Weezy listens to Thicke?”
Lil’ Wayne: Fuck people.(via Leon)
Though it’s unlikely you’ll write something nobody has ever heard of, the way you have a chance to compete is in the way you say it.
Amy Hempel (via meaghano) (via austinkleon)
Cassidy had no idea what made Andrea so different, but he could sense that she had somehow survived twenty years as an attractive female in the republic without having had her mind reamed out by mama, the Junior League or Helen Gurley Brown.
The best line from John L. Parker’s otherwise okayish book, Once a Runner.
I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.
The problem with clichés is not that they contain false ideas, but rather that they are superficial articulations of very good ones. The sun is often on fire at sunset and the moon discreet, but if we keep saying this every time we encounter a sun or a moon, we will end up believing that this is the last rather than the first word to be said on the subject. Clichés are detrimental insofar as they inspire us to believe that they adequately describe a situation while merely grazing its surface. And if this matters, it is because the way we speak is ultimately linked to the way we feel, because how we describe the world must at some level reflect how we first experience it.
Alain de Botton. Wehr in the World: The problem with clichés.
The life I have chosen gives me my full hours of enjoyment for the balance of my life. The Sun will not rise, or set, without my notice, and thanks.
Winslow Homer, in a letter to his family. (via)
If you’re dancing and not within two people of a girl, you’re doing it wrong.
Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think, and this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within… By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks he was able to feel that he was nowhere.
You can afford to expose yourself to uncertainties in art that you wouldn’t allow yourself in real life. You can allow yourself to get into situations where you are completely lost, and where you are disoriented. You don’t know what’s going on, and you can actually not only allow yourself to do that, you can enjoy it.
From a Punk interview with Brian Eno circa 1976, via A Piece of Monologue.
What writers have is a license and also the freedom to sit—to sit, clench their fists, and make themselves be excruciatingly aware of the stuff that we’re mostly aware of only on a certain level. And if the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is. Wake the reader up to stuff that the reader’s been aware of all the time.
David Foster Wallace quoted in The Howling Fantods Q&A with David Lipsky. Like I said, I wish Wallace had done stand-up comedy, too, because this attitude seems perfect for it. Isn’t that what many great comedians do? A voice in the wilderness kind of thing, standing apart or going deep and observing and noticing more than you, and pointing out these things in a way that makes you happy.
Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.
He keeps saying he’s going to erupt into some unspeakable atrocity such as waving his dingdong at an Embassy.
Letters of Note: Burroughs has gone insane. Letter from Jack Kerouac re: William Burroughs.
Mark Larson 