Brian Marren > Brian's Quotes

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
― George Orwell, Why I Write

“He wondered about the people in houses like those. They would be, for example, small clerks, shop-assistants, commercial travellers, insurance touts, tram conductors. Did they know that they were only puppets dancing when money pulled the strings? You bet they didn’t. And if they did, what would they care? They were too busy being born, being married, begetting, working, dying. It mightn’t be a bad thing, if you could manage it, to feel yourself one of them, one of the ruck of men. Our civilization is founded on greed and fear, but in the lives of common men the greed and fear are mysteriously transmuted into something nobler. The lower-middle-class people in there, behind their lace curtains, with their children and their scraps of furniture and their aspidistras — they lived by the money-code, sure enough, and yet they contrived to keep their decency. The money-code as they interpreted it was not merely cynical and hoggish. They had their standards, their inviolable points of honour. They ‘kept themselves respectable’— kept the aspidistra flying. Besides, they were alive. They were bound up in the bundle of life. They begot children, which is what the saints and the soul-savers never by any chance do.

The aspidistra is the tree of life, he thought suddenly.”
― George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying

“I'm very depressed how in this country you can be told "That's offensive" as though those two words constitute an argument.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Every man, through fear, mugs his aspirations a dozen times a day.”
― Brendan Francis Behan

“Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self."

[The New Statesman, February 25, 1933]”
― Cyril Connolly

“There's a rebel lying deep in my soul. Anytime anybody tells me the trend is such and such, I go the opposite direction. I hate the idea of trends. I hate imitation; I have a reverence for individuality.”
― Clint Eastwood, Wild Open Spaces: Why We Love Westerns

“The simplest acts of kindness are by far more powerful then a thousand heads bowing in prayer.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“On the one hand maybe I’ve remained infantile, while on the other I matured quickly, because at a young age I was very aware of suffering and fear.”
― Audrey Hepburn

“Compassion is a verb.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh

“It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.”
― Albert Camus, Neither Victims Nor Executioners

“The British are the only people in history crass enough to have made revolutionaries out of Americans.”
― Shashi Tharoor

“We have a large public that is very ignorant about public affairs and very susceptible to simplistic slogans by candidates who appear out of nowhere, have no track record, but mouth appealing slogans”
― Zbigniew Brzezinski

“Most Americans are close to total ignorance about the world. They are ignorant. That is an unhealthy condition in a country in which foreign policy has to be endorsed by the people if it is to be pursued. And it makes it much more difficult for any president to pursue an intelligent policy that does justice to the complexity of the world.”
― Zbigniew Brzezinski

“To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.”
― Thomas Paine, The American Crisis

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”
― Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad / Roughing It

“Living in a foreign country is one of those things that everyone should try at least once. My understanding was that it completed a person, sanding down the rough provincial edges and transforming you into a citizen of the world.

What I find appealing in life abroad was the inevitable sense of helplessness it would inspire. Equally exciting would be the work involved in overcoming that helplessness. There would be a goal involved, and I like having goals.”
― David Sedaris

“He was one of the numerous and varied legion of dullards, of half-animated abortions, conceited, half-educated coxcombs, who attach themselves to the idea most in fashion only to vulgarize it and who caricature every cause they serve, however sincerely.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“The day I found my smile again was when I stood in my own storm and danced with my tribe.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“A lion walks alone. He does not need a pack of wolves to follow him.”
― Amit Abraham

“Any fool can make a rule
And any fool will mind it.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Journal #14

“Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it's conformity.”
― Rollo May

“Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.”
― John F. Kennedy

“You laugh at me because I'm different, I laugh at you because you're all the same.”
― Jonathan Davis

“The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“Conform and be dull.”
― James Frank Dobie

“I would rather be an artist than a leader. Ironically, a leader has to follow the rules.”
― Criss Jami, Venus in Arms

“The urge to shout filthy words at the top of his voice was as strong as ever.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“All the heroes of tomorrow are the heretics of today.”
― Yip Harburg