J.B. Morton Quotes

No one has the Houdini school of composition.

It's not a special taste. An American composer should have something to say to a cab driver.

It is only too easy to compel a sensitive human being to feel guilty about anything.

What meditation does mean is a way for us to unlock and open the door to the kingdom of heaven. Jesus began his ministry by proclaiming that this holy kingdom was within us and among us.

While it costs us a lot to adopt children, it cost God the blood of His own Son.

I don't get the point in a lot of biopics, they're boring. You know what's gonna happen. You're just watching actors show off.

I was angry but not at God. I feel that you are closer to God when you are messed up. Definitely. That's when you most need God, and God cannot control what man does.

Everyone acquainted with the subject will recognize it as a conspicuous failure.

One, I had never worked with John Woo before and I wanted to see what that was like, and two, Ben Affleck is a friend, so it would be fun to work with him again.

When I started off many years ago, I made a determination that there were certain roles I didn't want to play.

Basically, the actor's job is to pay attention to the script.

Since music has never had a Rembrandt, we have remained nothing more than musicians.

What we assume, what we have never clearly thought out, controls us.

The Negroes have little invention, but strong powers of imitation, so that they readily acquire mechanic arts. They have a great talent for music, and all their external senses are remarkably acute.

The assumption that Derrida always knows what he is talking about is not Derridean.

What a writer brought to a book didn't matter as much as what the reader contributed.

If you do what you fear, you won't fear what you do.

Wagner is the Puccini of music.

All true readers have a book, a moment when real life is never going to be able to compete with fiction again.

I write what I'd like to read and just hope that, along the way, others might like to read them, too.

Keep your eye on the main chance and don't stop to kick every barking dog.

Boulez, who is everything I don't want art to be... Boulez, who once said in an essay that he is not interested in how a piece sounds, only how it is made.

What astonishes many of us is not so much that human nature is fundamentally corrupt; we are astonished rather that it does not behave more wickedly than it obviously does.

Everyone wants to look their best, everyone has dreams of wanting to look like something else. But we are who we are.

I want to prove that you don't have to come from Oxford University or Rada - and you don't have to have parents that support you - to succeed.

I can't act without music very well.

I sound contemptuous, but I am not. I am interested--intrigued even--by the way time erases real lives, leaving only vague imprints. Blood and spirit fade away so that only names and dates remain.

She was the sort of person for whom fear was the natural response to that beyond explanation.

Will history remember us, I wonder? I do hope so - to imagine that one might do something, touch an event somehow, & thereby transcend the bounds of a single human lifetime!

The river was so blue it seemed to be breathing.

To abandon a child, she had once said to someone, when she thought Cassandra couldn't hear, was an act so cold, so careless, it refused forgiveness.

Had any poet adequately described the wretched ugliness of a loved one turned inside out with grief?

That, my dear, is what makes a character interesting, their secrets.

Even the most pragmatic person fell victim at times to a longing for something other.

The world was an awfully large place and it wasn't easy to find a person who'd gone missing sixty years earlier, even if that person was oneself.

I'm not a writer. I think I can write short stories and poetry, but film writing, brilliant film writing, is a talent - you can't just do it like that.

A piece of writing is only worth doing if you're a different person at the end of the process than you were at the beginning.

So we recast the wisdom of the great thinkers in the shape of our illusions. They are shiny from their makeovers, they are fabulous and gorgeous, and they want us to know that we can have it all.

Even in your smallest gestures, you express your sense of honor, if you have one.

Every choice we make is either a growth choice or a fear choice.

In moments of crisis, the initiative passes to those who are best prepared.

Poverty is such a relative thing; but no man is really poor till life becomes a desert island that gives him neither food nor shelter nor hope.

Economy: cutting down other people's wages.

To fairy flutes, As the light advances, In square black boots The cabman dances.

If you have the skill, then you can move as you age.

There are lots of stories about my culture that I think bring a whole other perspective to who we are and where we have been and how we got here that I think need to be done.

With my background, I came out of the theater.

If someone wants to give me the lead in anyone of those films, and deal with those other complications, terrific, Im ready for them.

Unfortunately, most actors want to play off their own personal mystique and good looks and whatever, but that will only carry you but so far.

I would love to play the villain, but again, it sort of what happens in this industry.