Ideas Quotes - Page 644

People buy ideas, they don't buy photographs.

Those of us who read carried around with us like martyrs a secret knowledge, a secret joy, and a secret hope: There is a life worth living where history is still taking place; there are ideas worth dying for, and circumstances where courage is still prized.

And as experienced as I am, it still summons an act of bravery from me, and I like that. I like the idea of setting an example - proving that it is acceptable to be alone in a public place where everyone else is in groups, and to just be sitting there eating, not having to be engrossed in anything else.

I didn't really know anything about Margot Fonteyn. I'd never really been a ballet child, so I had no idea what an incredibly huge icon she was, not just in terms of a creative icon - she was also a style icon. I had no idea she was up there with Audrey Hepburn and Jackie Onassis in terms of that kind of image.

It's so rich as a trope - the whole idea of the road and it being in terms of language, being an active experience.

I think for me in terms of this kind of dichotomy you have to hold the sense of negative capability in your mind - which is Keats line about being able to hold two different ideas 'without any irritable reach after fact or reason.'

I like the idea of the object, the relic. And I see it as a time machine too or a device you plug into a socket that activates a sound and light show.

To conjure a particular knowledge you visualize an architectural structure and then you walk around and see the details that then bring back the words or the poetry or the lines of thought. Memory's going extinct because we rely on machines and copies and so on. The idea of working with structures that conjure dreams, personages, history, time, that can be contained in this way as you walk through your mind, is a challenge.

I think the idea of the lone tormented artist - which we can apply to others - I think that it needs to be revisited. Jack Kerouac needs to be seen in the context of a lot of other artistic activity.

Who shot you?" For a moment he looked annoyed. "I fail to see what that's got to do with anything. Reading assures me that anyone who's ever met me would have reason to shoot me, so I must admit with all candor that I have no idea. Was it you?" "If I'd shot you I wouldn't have missed," she said. "Was that wishful thinking or are you in fact a practiced shot?" "Desire would have made up for lack of expertise.

Feminism is not simply the idea that women can benefit from rediscovering themselves but also that our whole culture can benefit from correcting its psychic/sexual imbalance through each person becoming whole again.

I tell you, we would be hard put to determine what is more evil -- religion or the pure idea. The intervention of the supernatural or the elegant abstract solution! Both have bathed this earth in suffering; both have brought the human race literally and figuratively to its knees.

People ask my mother whether she had any idea that I'd be CEO of a company some day, and she would say, 'Absolutely not. Totally out of the realm of possibility.' There was certainly nothing that would have been very predictable in my upbringing.

I've heard people say that God is the gift of desperation, and there's a lot to be said for having really reached a bottom where you've run out of any more good ideas or plans for everybody else's behavior; or how to save and fix and rescue; or just get out of a huge mess, possibly of your own creation.

Mothering has been the richest experience of my life, but I am still opposed to Mother's Day. It perpetuates the dangerous idea that all parents are somehow superior to non-parents.

My natural tendency is to complicate everything--and then to spray words and ideas onto everything afterwards. I've had to develop the habit of keeping things simple.

We must treat ideas somewhat as though they were baby fish. Throw thousands out into the waters. Only a handful will survive but that is plenty.

Are we changing the idea of what beauty is? Let's hope so. I'm not the typical Hollywood beauty. Let's hope we're looking at the insides of people a little more.

Because I take very seriously the idea that I can make an impact in the world, I hold back my voice so I can make more of an impact when I do use it. A cause like One Billion Rising is something I want to scream about, and I want you to take that scream seriously because I don't fall out of nightclubs. I don't have photographers capture me spending untold amounts on a handbag.

In many ways, a degree in the history of ideas is the ideal training for an aspiring writer.

I'm always open to somebody else having a better idea, but I feel like, if it feels real, then people aren't thinking about it and they're just doing the acting of it.

I write anywhere - when I have an idea it’s hard not to write. I used to be kind of precious about where I wrote. Everything had to be quiet and I couldn’t be disturbed, it really filled my day.

Usually one or two things happen: Either you have an idea straightaway - the sort of sound that you want or the instrumentation or one particular sound that you want to feature - or you don't.

When I began to be published, people got the idea that I should 'teach writing,' which I have no idea how to do and don't really believe in.

If the generous ideas of youth are too often over- clouded by the sordid views of after-life, that scarcely proves them to be false