I.B. George Quotes

Toni Morrison seems to have a lot of faith in people - that's what I mean by gentle power.

I think the wave of social media rejection is coming. I think there will be a big reaction against it. It's just like sugar- - mean, I loved it as a kid.

I had an experience a few years ago where I was on a plane in which one of the engines went out. I couldn't even remember my name. I was just repeating the word no over and over.

I'm such a baby if I even get a flu.

In the absolute sense - kind of from the God's-eye view - God might feel like, "I made this thing that has all of that in it, all the horror and all the beauty."

In a certain way, we're always toggling back and forth between the absolute and the relative, if that makes sense.

I remember reading The Bluest Eye when I was a young parent, and something opened in me. That's the highest aspiration.

There are books that I read years ago that enlivened things in me that haven't died yet.

I have this tendency to take a little bit of questionable knowledge and riff on it.

The internet kind of feels like happiness sometimes, however. It feels like stimulation.

I don't mind being criticized intelligently; although I don't love it.

What's really baffling to me is the way that the technology has risen up to help us become more materialistic.

I think when you get to export your creative impulse into something, it kind of lessens that busy energy that can be so confrontational and pissy.

I do find the values in A Christmas Carol significant. It is important not to be mean and stingy and not to give up love for money.

I don't really write beautifully naturally, unlike some people.

[Lincoln in the Bardo] is not a long book. And that meant I could obsess over it and live in it both backwards and forwards and hyper-control everything.

Whole swaths of the book [Lincoln in the Bardo] are made up of verbatim quotes from various historical sources, which I cut up and rearranged to form part of the narrative.

I don't feel like I have the intelligence to really inhabit a consistently high level of prose.

It blew my mind, reading Swing Time, that I could take any sentence in the book, and it was one of the most beautiful sentences written in English.

I was thinking about the legacy of ghosts in fiction, and specifically the moral power of those Dickensian ghosts. Because a ghost can be a very powerful but also manipulative element.

For me, things were either very sullied or very pure, very controlled or very under-controlled.

As a kid, I had a real fascination with perverse, off-color, and kind of risky things, and I also had a very sanctimonious Catholic, purist side.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that whatever weirdness was going to be in there, I felt, had to be earned. And it had to be required by the emotional needs of the book.

[Reading Swing Time] made me a feel a little bit like when I used to read David [Foster] Wallace. Like, "I can't play that game. I wish I could, but I can't do it."

I think when you see [Donald] Trump in person, my reaction is you kind of enjoy it. It's kind of an enjoyable night out.

I like [Barak] Obama. I like him. So how far does rationality help to persuade anybody? You know, I'm not so sure.

A person supporting [Donald]Trump likes Trump. And I think they would say the same about me.

The lower sort of men must be indulged the consolation of finding fault with those above them; without that, they would be so melancholy that it would be dangerous, considering their numbers.

Being wise doth either make men our friends or discourage them from being our enemies.

The sense of ultimate truth is the intellectual counterpart of the esthetic sense of perfect beauty, or the moral sense of perfect good.

Nothing has an uglier look to us than reason, when it is not on our side.

An old man concludeth from his knowing mankind that they know him too, and that maketh him very wary.

The more powerful a person or institution is, the more transparent - open to public inspection or oversight - its activities should be. The less powerful, the less transparent.

2.2 billion worth of military equipment had been stripped from U.S. Forces in West Germany and America and shipped to Israel in an unprecedented day and night airlift.

Can anybody be given creativity? No. Only equipment to develop it if it's in them in the first place.

You know, when you've established a certain thing, what can you do? You're stuck with it.

I don't like freedom jazz - I think it's void of roots and void of foundation.

In Braille you write your flat sign first and then your note.

We're travelling for about nine-and-a-half months a year.

Teddy Wilson, I think, said a little while ago that its much easier to come in and play whatever comes into your mind, without obeying any of the laws of bass line and harmony and so on.

Gilles Deleuze believed that every society needed a madman so we could feel better about ourselves. I do my best to fill that role.

I don't smoke because I like to do so, but because it makes me pay cigarette taxes, which helps build roads and water supplies.

Think about all the selfish non-smokers out there, driving around on asphalt, drinking water out of the tap, not even thinking about how smokers' taxes help pay for it all.

The people of our state will no longer tolerate advocates of treason.

Don't look at the downside of everything that comes along. It helps life move along so much smoother and nicer.

I liked Nixon fine, but Nixon was not a partier

Kennedy was a lot of fun, always. He had something going on. But not Nixon.

I think we all want to know where we came from and how we fit into the world, but some of us need to know how it all works in great detail.

Both my parents instilled an interest in science and mathematics.

I played football and ran track in junior high, but by high school I was getting serious about my studies.