E. P. Thompson Quotes

The McGovern/McCarthy type candidacies have disappointed too many people, because of a disillusionment with the candidates themselves.

What the hell is the sense of trying to hold the Democratic party together, if it's really a party of expediency, something that's put together every four years?

Any candidate who'd offered a real possibility of an alternative to Nixon - someone with a different concept of the presidency - could have challenged him and come very close to beating him.

At Texas A&M you learn first to follow, then to develop and practice your leadership skills, and finally you become someone others want to follow.

An important part of what the state does is preserving its history.

I told her the world was full of nice people. I'd have hated to try to prove it to her, but I said it, anyway.

In obstetrics and gynecology, the term abortionist is still a dirty word.

A southerner would fry a salad if he could figure out how.

My goal was just to tell the unlikely story in a way that would feel as convincing as possible.

I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different—unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.

To be a good editor or a good writer, I think you really need to be a great reader first.

Who knows how fast a second-guess can travel? Who has ever measured the exact speed of regret?

I really believe that fiction functions best when stories are allowed to develop in an organic way, so I didn't set out to deliver a specific message.

Working as an editor was like being a professional reader, and the better I became at reading the better I became at writing.

An editor is like a professional reader, and as I became a better reader, I also became a better writer.

Sometimes death is proof of life. Sometimes decay points out a certain verve.

In general, I think I'm quick to worry about disasters of all kinds.

It took me years to learn that sentences in fiction must do much more than stand around and look pretty.

Sentences or solutions occur to me in the shower, or while running on the treadmill, or riding on the subway.

There's a pleasure in being reminded of the value of ordinary life.

Some say that love is the sweetest feeling, the purest form of joy, but that isn't right. It's not love--it's relief.

If I read a scary story in the newspaper, I find I'm haunted by it.

I'm an only child, and I think one of the sweet things about that is that my parents are really interested in every aspect of my life.

Sometimes the saddest stories take the fewest words.

Even beauty, in abundance, turns creepy.

It's really hard to get a book published, even a good book, but the better the book is the better chance it has of eventually catching someone's attention.

Our fears are an amazing gift of the imagination, a kind of everyday clairvoyance, a way of glimpsing what might be the future when there's still time to influence how that future will play out.

Nothing has happened to me out of the closet that was anywhere near as dangerous as being closeted.

I feel like writing a book there's always a version in your head that's an amazing version, but then you write the version that you can write.

I was a book editor for nine years. I'm familiar with the opposite experience, bracing myself for the likelihood that no one would want to publish my book.

I left my job in the fall, and now I can set my life up around writing instead of squeezing writing into my day; it's amazing to have that time, and I feel very lucky.

I fell in love with Virginia Woolf in college. I especially admire how well she writes about daily life, how she captures so much meaning and consequence in the smallest details of a day.

I love conventional apocalypse movies. In movies, I like to be with the President, or the scientist trying to solve the problem, but that's not the kind of fiction that I like to read.

And charge it please.

For most of that time, I've also been a keen gardener, but for many years I failed to make the connection between gardening and science.

That brings me to Dennis Ritchie. Our collaboration has been a thing of beauty.

I wanted to have virtual memory, at least as it's coupled with file systems.

I also enjoy writing my regular column for Organic Gardening magazine, so I may do more of that sort of thing in the future, if anybody wants it!

I still have a full-time day job, which is why it took me five years to write An Ear to the Ground, and why I won't have another book finished by next week.

So maybe I can go back to being a Gardeners' World addict again.

One is that the perfect garden can be created overnight, which it can't.

I'm a happy person, and I want everybody else to be happy. Nothing wrong with that.

Singing a melody is like a lot of easier and when you sing harmony you have to really kind of know music and listen to the music and be able to hear the notes or whatever.

I don't know if people really know, when you shoot a TV show like you're really family and it really works, it's because it seems real to everybody, even to us. We were all so very close.

I was always pretty funny with my friends.

Kids have awkward moments.

I want to get into producing and writing more for myself - setting up my own films and seeing what kind of personal touch I can put on movies, as opposed to just being in them.

I owe a lot to Nickelodeon.

I always just want to do non-typical voices for some reason.

I was a good student in school.