John Quotes

Students present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.

irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it.

Don't you see, if when we die there's nothing, all your sun and fields and what not are all, ah, horror? It's just an ocean of horror.

Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.

Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.

The first breathe of adultery is the freest.

You cannot but learn more of the world's heft, as you take it now into your hands.

The worst thing in the world is a bitter woman. That's one thing about your mother, she's never been bitter.

The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd; raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our essential selves.

Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless; we do not imagine, we view.

Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.

I am sometimes visited by the heretical thought that there is no such thing as good and bad architecture, any more than there is good and bad nature. It is all in where you stand at the time.

Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.

As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.

You know how it is with fathers, you never escape the idea that maybe after all they're right.

The fact that we still live well cannot ease the feeling that we no longer live nobly.

Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products.

All those little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart.

If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.

The difference between a childhood and a boyhood must be this: our childhood is what we alone have had; our boyhood is what any boy in our environment would have had.

Accent the ugly until it becomes gorgeous.

Our listeners asked us: "What is chaos?" We're answering: "We do not comment on economic policy."

What other creature, besides the lion, the tiger, and the whale, can answer Creation in its own language?

If we can ... get them to understand that saying 'no' to drugs is rebelling against their parents and the generations of the past, we'd make it an enormous success.

I used the N-word instead of calling him Trevor. I used it just not thinking... I told Trev this is an old wound with me. I grew up with it. I am sorry as anybody that it stuck with me.

Custom, madam, is the law of fools, but it shall never govern me.

If women were humbler, men would be honester.

True virtue, wheresoever it moves, still carries an intrinsic worth about it.

When debtors once have borrowed all we have to lend, they are very apt to grow shy of their creditors' company.

Love, like virtue, is its own reward.

The message from the hedge-leaves, Heed it, whoso thou art; Under lowly eaves Lives the happy heart.

The world is just going to continue to fragment, and that's a great thing.

Making love to robots will probably be great one day. It's just not a viable option right now.

As a studio, you have to have a niche. You have to provide a service and there has to be a reason for your being around.

Bands will always need studios. The more people there are recording at home, the more people there will be who are going to need a studio.

I'm a collector, a tinkerer, and a tweaker, like a lot of people, and recording equipment is really easy to fetishize.

In fact, it's in my interest to love digital recording, and I just spent a ton on a new digital recording system, so I speak from a place of heavy investment in both sides.

There is definitely a nostalgia, and I am very sentimental, so I don't begrudge people for having sentimental feelings towards vinyl.

I believe that if you think about what style means, you won't become a fashion victim.

I loved the MC5 and the Stooges, but also, the British Invasion - the Kinks and the Yardbirds - and then Led Zeppelin, of course. Alice Cooper was one of my favorite bands.

The biggest ones [online stores] I go back to are Amazon.com and eBay.com because it’s great for music and books... I collect vintage vinyl records.

I spent a lot of years working for Ralph Lauren, and he had so many copycats, from Tommy Hilfiger to Abercrombie & Fitch to J.Crew.

At the edge of the cliffs, the wind is a smack, and D-day becomes wildly clear: climbing that cutting edge into the bullets.

In the artist's recreation of the world we are enabled to see the world.

It is one of the ironies of history that reformers so often misjudge the consequences of their reforms.

We have to face the fact that most men and women out there are more stale than they know, more bored than they care to admit.

One generalization that is supported both by research and experience is that effective two-way communication is essential to proper functioning of the leader-follower relationship.

If our society continues at its present rate to become less livable as it becomes more affluent, we promise all to end up in sumptuous misery.

Paralysis of leadership is due in part to the unseen grip of the special interests.

Sympathy is never waisted except when you give it to yourself.