John Quotes

Just don't do things that depress you. I realized if it depresses me, then I just don't want to get close to it. If it brings me down, I just really can't get into it.

I'm a paranoid schizophrenic. I am my own entourage!

My job is to just express something that I want to express. And if I'm ahead or behind the curve, that's for others to decide.

I think when you get to the point where you don't need to be in love, then you could be in love. You have to just be OK with yourself-and that's a long process.

I don't tend to think in terms of a moral authority - be a good boy, do good things - more in terms of what feels right.

I don't agonize over decisions as much these days. The criteria of what's important to me is clear.

Justice always has context.

I don't walk around talking about my life and spouting my philosophy to people I don't know. I mean, if I get to know them, I'll talk for hours. I guess I like a lower-key scene.

I was never interested in being an overly public person.

If you wanna give me an award, I'll take it. Just don't make me go to the party afterwards.

A lot of powerful people in Washington may think it's a crazy-leftist-fringe position to think the intellectual authors of a torture regime should be investigated and prosecuted.

Most movies, once the action starts there's no more characters. You say a couple of dumb lines and then there's just explosions until the end.

I never wanted to come off as self-important.

The British keep employing me, and that makes me like them. It also makes me think they're very intelligent.

Satire is meant to have teeth; satire is meant to be dangerous. But it also happens to be fun because subversion and telling the right kind of people to go to hell is supposed to feel good.

I think it's very improtant and healthy to tell differnt stories than the corporatist narratives we are being asked to swallow hook, line and sinker.

Not only is America a country where torture is now policy. It's now outsourced. It's given to companies at a cost-plus basis. It's a triple whammy of surreal, absolute madness.

The people who say they're for democracy want nothing to do with democracy.

We are coming to see that there should be no stifling of labor by capital, or of capital by labor; and also that there should be no stifling of labor by labor, or of capital by capital.

A writer judging his own work is like deceived husband - he is frequently the last person to appreciate the true state of affairs.

During my addled career as a trout fisherman I have gone on a lot of wild-goose chases, and I ruefully expect to go on a lot more before I hang up my waders

I listened to a lot of stories when I was a kid. My mother told me stories, and I loved them.

Sometimes the essay is where we end up when everything that we know must change.

I know it sounds silly, but disrespecting a dead writer by sitting in a chair that probably never belonged to him still felt like a risk to me. So I chickened out.

At 23, you can completely, literally reinvent yourself if you want to.

People say friends don't destroy one another. What do they know about friends?

I just started writing stuff to kill time on summer evenings. This is why I'm always telling people who ask me what they need to do to succeed to give up, do something else.

Ideas that change business models and that can make money are the most threatening, outside actual religion.

Americans like to give their President the benefit of the doubt.

Bill Rehnquist makes Barry Goldwater look like a liberal.

Being a man of faith, what was so interesting to me was the subject, which started, by the way, with Anne Rice's wonderful books.

I tell you, with complex numbers you can do anything.

All genuine learning comes through experience.

Mankind likes to think in terms of extreme opposites.

It requires troublesome work to undertake the alteration of old beliefs.

The educational process has no end beyond itself; it is its own end.

All education which develops power to share effectively in social life is moral.

I should venture to assert that the most pervasive fallacy of philosophic thinking goes back to neglect of context.

Inference is always an invasion of the unknown, a leap from the known.

Expertness of taste is at once the result and reward of constant exercise of thinking.

Balance is balancing.

...the moment of passage from disturbance into harmony is that of intensest life.

Legislation is a matter of more or less intelligent improvisation aiming at palliating conditions by means of patchwork policies.

What nutrition and reproduction are to physiological life, education is to social life.

The future of our civilisation depends upon the widening spread and deepening hold of the scientific habit of mind.

A being whose activities are associated with others has a social environment. What he does and what he can do depend upon the expectations, demands, approvals, and condemnations of others.

We have lost confidence in reason because we have learned that man is chiefly a creature of habit and emotion.

The outstanding problem of the Public is discovery and identification of itself

As a child lives today, he will live tomorrow.

Criticism of the commitment of religion to the supernatural is thus positive in import.