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All Quotes Collection
"Technology determines the possibilities of society. It doesn't matter whether you start out from a fascist state or a communist state or a free-market state."
43
"I still find it hard to understand that anyone could argue that you can't have machines that exhibit consciousness."
42
"As long as a film stays unmade, the book is entirely yours, it belongs to the writer. As soon as you make it into a film, suddenly more people see it than have ever read the book."
38
"Through writing, through that process, they realize that they become more intelligent, and more honest and more imaginative than they can be in any other part of their life."
35
"John Brown first swam into my vision in the 1960s when I was a political activist in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement at Chapel Hill, where I went to university."
33
"Lists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves."
43
"My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history."
43
"One of the things I have tried to do with this book and with all of them really is avoid that simple, easy, reductionist view of motivation and to show we do things for a complex net of reasons, a real braid of reasons."
39
"The 60s passed and faded and I grew older, and in 1987 bought a house in upstate New York, and it turned out that John Brown was buried down the road from my house and that he had lived there longer than anywhere else and his house was still standing."
Road,
51
"If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter while you are writing than while you are hanging out with your pals or in any other line of work."
42
"A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties."
37
"And out of a desire essentially to imitate what I was reading, I began to write, like a clever monkey."
47
"What I am finding now is that my audience is getting younger as I get older, which is a very good thing as you know - you don't want them to get older as you get older."
41
"I began as a boy with artistic talent... as a visual artist... I thought that was what I'd become and in my late teens drifted into reading serious literature."
49
"Life was very simple. My parents had come from the North of England, which is a fairly rugged, bleak, hard-working part of England, and so there was not the expectation of luxury."
58
"My athleticism was really the core to social acceptance, because in those days the overwhelming number of students came from more of a public school background than I did."
42
"When I was about to break a world record and become well known, my mother used to say that for her the important thing was for me to become a doctor - a career which had not been possible in her generation and in her society. Sport was something to be set aside."
48
"You get very tired, and there was a certain amount of pain and you slow up. Your legs are so tired that you are in fact slowing. If you don't keep running, keep your blood circulating, the muscles stop pumping the blood back and you get dizzy."
49
"Your spikes, which were really quite long then, would catch the material of the track and your shoe would get heavier. I was simply filing them down and rubbing some graphite on the spikes. I thought I would run more effectively."
43
"The Athletic Association competed against the University. So there was an event. You cannot break world records unless it is an established event, and you have three timekeepers, and the whole thing is organized."
43
"My concentration was really on getting to university and becoming a doctor. My parents let me know that school marks were important. Achievement was something which came by hard work."
41
"I enjoy singing, and the instruments which truly move me are the horn, the trumpet and the cello."
57
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