#dio

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be… ↗

— Joan Didion

#on-keeping-a-notebook #self #love

The last time that I consciously wrote anything to 'save the honor of the Left', as I rather pompously put it, was my little book on the crookedness and cowardice and corruption (to put it no higher) of Clinton. I used leftist categories to measure him, in other words, and to show how idiotic was the belief that he was a liberal's champion. Again, more leftists than you might think were on my side or in my corner, and the book was published by Verso, which is the publishing arm of the New Left Review. However, if a near-majority of leftists and liberals choose to think that Clinton was the target of a witch-hunt and the victim of 'sexual McCarthyism', an Arkansan Alger Hiss in other words, you become weary of debating on their terms and leave them to make the best of it. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#arkansas #bill-clinton #corruption #cowardice #debate

To hold power has always meant to manipulate idiots and circumstances; and those circumstances and those idiots, tossed together, bring about those coincidences to which even the greatest men confess they owe most of their fame ↗

— Alfred de Vigny

#idiocy #power #fame

Play difficult and interesting things. If you play boring things, you risk losing your appetite. Saxophone can be tedious with too much of the same. ↗

— Steve Lacy

#boring #boring things #difficult #interesting #interesting things

I fell in love with jazz when I was 12 years old from listening to Duke Ellington and hearing a lot of jazz in New York on the radio. ↗

— Steve Lacy

#duke ellington #ellington #fell #hearing #i

I am racing to the studio the moment that God affords me the opportunity to hear again. ↗

— Foxy Brown

#again #am #god #hear #i

I do a lot of performing, but don't get a chance to go to the studio and write good music. ↗

— Bobby McFerrin

#get #go #good #good music #i

We gain nothing by being with such as ourselves. We encourage one another in mediocrity. I am always longing to be with men more excellent than myself. ↗

— Charles Lamb

#am #another #being #encourage #excellent

My record at the University of California as an undergraduate was mediocre to say the best. ↗

— Douglass North

#california #mediocre #record #say #undergraduate

But what's interesting is now - and not only in horror, but across the board - the studios basically only make B pictures with A budgets. That's the biggest difference. ↗

— John Landis

#basically #biggest #biggest difference #board #budgets