J. F. Powers Quotes

The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body.

I think a lot of people in the Conservative party came from other parties. There wouldn't be a Conservative party today if people hadn't come from other parties.

The seas and the weathers are what is; your vessels adapt to them or sink.

President Kennedy was the greatest man I ever met, and the best friend I ever had.

I wanted to be in The Emerald Forest. I chased that one for six months before it all came about. I wanted to work with John Boorman!

Maybe happiness is like a virus. Maybe it's one of those bugs that sits for a long time, so we don't even know that we are infected.

If you're going to immerse yourself in a project for three years, why not stake out a chunk of the world that is completely alien to you and go traveling?

The web: yet another total disorientation that becomes status quo without anyone realizing it.

I keep a quotes journal - of every sentence that I've wanted to remember from my reading of the past 30 years.

The desire to live in our imagination is driven by this suspicion that we're disembodied sensibilities cobbled into our bodies. That idea has infused most of human thought since the very beginning.

Freedom is not the same as lack of accountability.

I understood that 'The Yellow Birds' would be a peculiar representation of the experience of being at war. I intended it to be so.

I was very lighthearted. This often the way when the abandonment of personal responsibility is enforced: neither wronged innocence or just guilt can seriously impair the sensation of freedom one has.

Belief in the lie is the life of the lie.

The details of the world in which we live are always secondary to the fact that we must live in them.

I understand that it's incredibly difficult to watch what's happening on the news every day and not become inured to it. I've fallen victim to that myself, wanting to look away.

But I remember being told that the truth does not depend on being believed.

I've learned that having a lot of money is more fun than not having a lot of money, and that once you've got it, it tends to grow all by itself, like a fire.

Writing was always an aspiration, but I'd kept it a secret even from myself.

Joining the military is not to be taken lightly. You're putting every part of yourself at risk, not just your body but your moral and spiritual centre.

The first rule in keeping secrets is nothing on paper.

The eye is the window of the soul; even an animal looks for a man's intentions right into his eyes.

It's a reality of film festivals that you can't see everything. You're dividing your time between seeing films and utilizing that unique space to have meetings with people that you can't otherwise.

You can start a documentary with just a camera, as opposed to a fiction film where you need actors, a crew, a script, a lot more start-up resources. It may be self-perpetuating.

I'm just a newsboy who met a President.

We are losing our environment so rapidly.

Baseball is sunshine, green grass, fathers and sons, our rural past.

My mother danced; she loved the ballet.

All pain is the same. Only the details are different.

The movie industry used to be completely accessible. We all knew people in it, and nobody made a big fuss.

Camping is something I've done all my life.

The 'information novel' shouldn't be a curiosity. It should be absolutely mainstream.

All the different ways we know the world all come from the brain, and they all depend on each other to make sense.

I'm always most interested in writing about things that I don't understand.

Only white men have the luxury of ignoring race.

In a lot of ways, the task at hand for any poem is to approach something that defies exactness or definition with a kind of exactness or precision.

The war came to me in my dreams and showed me its sole purpose: to go on, only to go on.

Poetry and prose are of equal importance to me as a reader, and there doesn't seem to be much difference in my own writing.

For me, university was just awful because it was closing one door after the other of all these candy shops of professional possibilities.

Everything interests me.

I knew that at least a few of the stars I saw were probably gone already, collapsed into nothing. I felt like I was looking at a lie. But I didn't mind. The world makes liars of us all.

Only keep still, wait, and hear, and the world will open.

We will live with racism for ever. But senses of self, senses of belonging, senses of us and of others? Those are up for grabs.

I really like science because it seems to be that place where you get the big picture, everything connects.

I don't mind arguing with myself. It's when I lose that it bothers me.

We don't consider the roles that we're taking in making the world the way it is.

Type a few lines of code, you create an organism.

I used to work for 12 or 14 hours at a time but the digital age has made such happy immersions almost impossible.

The Midwest is such a tabula rasa.

The thing that makes reading and writing suspect in the eyes of the market economy is that it's not corrupted.