Lasdun Quotes

#1. I'm filled with admiration, delight, and gratitude at discovering James Lasdun's poems in A Jump Start. He has wit, speed, intelligence, a keen eye, precision, and imagination of a high order.

Anthony Hecht

#2. Brilliant. [Lasdun] seems to me certainly among the most gifted, vivid, and deft poets now writing in English, and far better than many who are more famous. His capacities are solidly established; his promise is nearly infinite.

Anthony Hecht

#3. The art world is molting - some would say melting. Galleries are closing; museums are scaling back.

Jerry Saltz

#4. There is something uncannily adaptive about anti-Semitism: the way it can hide, unsuspected, in the most progressive minds.

James Lasdun

#5. The nature of fiction is to make one distrustful of any character who lectures and castigates.

James Lasdun

#6. But dividing the mind into "biological" and "psychological" is as fallacious as classifying light as a particle or a wave. The natural world makes no promise to align itself with preconceptions that humans find parsimonious or convenient. (167)

Thomas Lewis

#7. For a long period of history, you were what people said about you, and if your reputation was stained, you were in very serious trouble. People fought duels over this. Then it fades away historically.

James Lasdun

#8. I don't think I could, with a straight face, describe myself as a completely positive person, but I'm not overly negative, either. On the whole, most writers think plots through to their consequences, and it's not always a sunny place. I have an occupational temperament for anxiety.

James Lasdun

#9. It is a less evil to be unable to live than not to know how to live.

Publilius Syrus

#10. I don't want to stockpile tuna fish and bullets. That's not the world I want to live in.

Richard Martin

#11. I am not a supporter of Israel's military policy, let alone any kind of Zionist.

James Lasdun

#12. Child and serpent, star and stone - all one.

P.L. Travers

#13. I consider myself a writer. I don't favour any type of writing. I sometimes wish short stories came more easily to me.

James Lasdun

#14. Oftentimes when I'm deciding to do a movie, the main thing is really, that I look at, is the director. I've come to feel that more and more. The more movies I've done and the older I've - the more experience I have, I always knew it was a director's medium, and I always said that.

Matt Damon

#15. What the Internet offers is this completely unfiltered transmission of thought to thought, of psyche to psyche, and whatever you're feeling, you can just sort of put it down and send it out there, and you can do it all in the confines of your room, without any actual contact.

James Lasdun

#16. The democratic process is supposed to be one person one vote, but it turns out that money is talking louder than the votes.

James Hansen

#17. Writers tend to write stories as a kind of holiday between novels, or as preliminary steps towards a novel. Stories just don't often make up a writer's main body of work, and that's not because they don't see the market for it.

James Lasdun

#18. A wise man's questions contain half the answer.

Solomon Ibn Gabirol

#19. Astonishing things can be done with the human memory if you will devote it faithfully to one particular line of business.

Mark Twain

#20. I got into online trading. It was alarmingly easy to do. I went through the whole cycle of emotions, from supreme self-confidence to total impotence. I broke even in the end.

James Lasdun

#21. So when you feel like hope is gone,
look inside you and be strong,
and you'll finally see the truth -
that a hero lies in you.

Mariah Carey

#22. I do wear a lot of hats, and sometimes people get confused with all that I do, but one thing that I am extraordinarily passionate about is furthering women's rights. I think it's something that's incredibly important, not just for girls everywhere but also boys to get involved in.

Adora Svitak

#23. When a friend of Abigail and John Adams was killed at Bunker Hill, Abigail's response was to write a letter to her husband and include these words, "My bursting heart must find vent at my pen.

David McCullough

#24. The short story seems like the best of all possible worlds. I do feel it is closer to writing poetry than to writing a novel, with its requirements of concentration and economy.

James Lasdun

#25. There are seldom more than a couple of students in any workshop who seem natural writers.

James Lasdun

#26. I love 'Titanic' and the idea that you're kind of rooting for Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet to survive despite the fact that you know that they're not going to.

Carlton Cuse

#27. I've just recently gotten divorced so I have a whole new horizon to conquer.

Melanie Griffith

#28. There was no question of generation change or saying goodbye to the past or modernizing sloganising.

Geoffrey Howe