Alan Quotes
The ability to absorb a book and make someone else's words and story your own was exactly was I was doing on stage.
No one knows the nature of God, or even if God exists. In a sense, all of our religions are literary works of the imagination.
A life is a moment in season. A life is one snowfall. A life is one autumn day. A life is the delicate, rapid edge of a closing door's shadow. A life is a brief movement of arms and of legs.
In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective.
As human beings, don't we need questions without answers as well as questions with answers, questions that we might someday answer and questions that we can never answer?
It's not necessarily a large number of people that affect the culture. You don't count the number of influential voices, you weigh them. A hundred people can affect the culture.
Every essay - the subject matter of every essay - is ultimately about the essayist; him or herself. That ultimately, every essayist is writing about his or her view of the world.
You say, "Something important really happened here. I really had hold of something I was visited by the muse." And that's enough to make you continue the months and years to finish the whole book.
You know what I wish? I wish all the scum of the Earth had one throat and I had my hands about it.
I am brother to dragons, and companion to owls. My skin is black upon me, and my bones are burned with heat.
Culture is just a shambling zombie that repeats what it did in life; bits of it drop off, and it doesn't appear to notice.
I don't like to go to conventions, and I don't like to relate to people on a level of hero worship, because there's no real communication going on there.
Material existence is entirely founded on a phantom realm of mind, whose nature and geography are unexplored.
It's only those exceptional and rare individuals who have brilliant ideas delivered to them by the muse, complete and gift wrapped. The rest of us have to work at it.
As I see it, part of the art of being a hero is knowing when you don't need to be one anymore.
The Conservative Party is a religion in that they are bound together by belief. Almost any organization has its religious aspects.
In many ways, my entire graphic novel career was a long diversion. Originally, all I wanted to do was to be an underground cartoonist and maybe bring out a groovy underground mag.
On the one occasion where I did try writing a screenplay, I found the rewriting just unendurable.
Optimization hinders evolution. Everything should be built top-down, except the first time. Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
I have this feeling that if I could sort out what's on my dining room table, everything would fall into place.
It is an ancient need to be told stories. But the story needs a great storyteller. Thanks for all of it, Jo.
In America, everybody thinks they're an entrepreneur. That's the problem. It's not a title that anybody should call oneself.
My idea of government support was, you supply me with hospitals, schools and the environment to do well and that will do me fine. But do not poke your nose in my business.
Well, there's nothing I've done I'm not proud of. Making money was an interest, but it's never been my god.
It's easy for me to say that now, now I'm a father, I've got a four-and-a-half year old boy, I'm a different person. Well, I'm still the same person, but I'm different.