Michael Silverblatt Quotes

#1. She had bumped me out of the center of my world. I'd become a baby person, and it felt good, better than what had come before.

Mohsin Hamid

#2. A beautiful word in the middle of a sentence can sometimes reduce me to tears in an interview, and when I'm reading, too. I've sometimes wondered whether I'm at the point of tears all the time because I use my eyes so much that they're strained and on the verge of tears anyway.

Michael Silverblatt

#3. I thought I was going to be a math major. My parents were both accountants and wanted me to major in business. Math was our compromise.

Michael Silverblatt

#4. They seem to be used to passing people, and probably not used to being passed.

Haruki Murakami

#5. Did you hear this - Sarah Palin finally heard what happened in Japan and she's demanding that we invade Tsunami. I mean she said, These Tsunamians will not get away with this. Oh speaking of dumb twats, did you ...

Bill Maher

#6. She taught you how to be a person who refuses anything but the meaningful.

Michael Silverblatt

#7. The greatest enemy of progress is your last success, you could become so proud of what you've already accomplished that you stop moving ahead to what you can still accomplish

Myles Munroe

#8. People tell me I have the best job in the world, which is true, but I also work with some of the best people in the world.

Michael Silverblatt

#9. Lying in bed and smoking my sixth or seventh cigarette of the morning, I'm wondering what the hell I'm going to do today. Oh yeah, I gotta write this thing. But that's not work, really, is it? It feels somehow shifty and ... dishonest, making a buck writing.

Anthony Bourdain

#10. To appreciate and use correctly a valuable maxim requires a genius; a vital appropriating exercise of mind closely allied to that which first created it.

William R. Alger

#11. I had to make a choice, either take care of my family and become a good son, or be a bad son and start working towards constructing a world of harmony and peace. I chose the later.

Abhijit Naskar

#12. If I want to have a conversation, I can't have a list of questions, because the second question on the list is going to interrupt the conversation.

Michael Silverblatt

#13. I like to think that at best the interview becomes something like the unaccountable experience of talking to oneself in a mirror.

Michael Silverblatt

#14. The book is an experience that allows you to witness your feelings without having to surrender to them, to succumb to them, or to be battered by them. It gives you access to a deep knowledge of how you would respond to things you would never, thank goodness, have been required to experience.

Michael Silverblatt

#15. I'm very against interviewers who do not have time to read the work, who accept jobs knowing that they don't have time to do the preparation.

Michael Silverblatt

#16. Nothing, I suppose, exasperates a woman more than the sexual desire for her of a man who is physically repellent to her, and when, to put it bluntly, he will not take no for an answer, she may very well come to hate him.

W. Somerset Maugham

#17. The art (as opposed to the technology) of reading requires that you develop a beautiful tolerance for incomprehension. The greatest books are the books that you come to understand more deeply with time, with age and with rereading.

Michael Silverblatt

#18. We buy the most expensive grain available growing on the best part of Russian land called black soil. We also play close attention to the purity of the water - we get it from Lake Ladoga. We store it ourselves to specific conditions. We carefully manage distillation at my distillery in Moscow.

Roustam Tariko

#19. I try and journal every day, and that's where a lot of my lyric comes from.

Jessie Baylin

#20. I stood there watching Phoebe arrange the pillows and the sheets. She isn't thinking that I ... I mean, she doesn't think that she and I would ... WHAT?

James Patterson

#21. Upstairs Margaret said abruptly, 'I suppose it starts to happen first in the suburbs,' and when Brad said, 'What starts to happen?' she said hysterically, 'People starting to come apart.

Shirley Jackson

#22. The hope and change the Democrats had in mind was nothing more than a retread of the failed and discredited socialist policies that have been the enemy of freedom for centuries all over the world. I fear America is teetering towards tyranny.

Jim DeMint

#23. In the course of interviewing, I've discovered that if you don't give your guest something to react to, they don't react. They simply say what they've been saying every time they've been interviewed. The last thing you want is to have people say to you what they've said to someone else.

Michael Silverblatt

#24. I'm often a crier and many things make me cry. I come from a crying family - my mother cries, my grandma used to cry. It was never shameful to cry. My father never told me men don't cry.

Michael Silverblatt