Quotes About John Williams

#1. John Williams is best known for his novels, Nothing But the Night, Stoner, Butcher's Crossing, and Augustus, for which he won the National Book Award in 1973.

John Edward Williams

#2. John Williams is, without question, talented. He writes very good scores and very good melodies and all that.

Andre Previn

#3. The best book I read in 2007 was Stoner by John Williams. It's perhaps the best book I've read in years.

Stephen Elliott

#4. I recently did a piece for the Boston Pops and John Williams, and I hope that it's as well a composed piece as I've ever done for any other medium or occasion.

Peter Maxwell Davies

#5. Troy and Sandra and Gabe acted out a lightsaber battle that brought tears to Elena's eyes, probably because they were all three singing the John Williams music.

Rainbow Rowell

#6. James Horner, James Newton Howard, John Williams, Hans Zimmer, Michael Giacchino, or Ramin Djawadi would all be a dream come true for a 'Throne of Glass' soundtrack.

Sarah J. Maas

#7. The album for Fiddler really took off. I think it was a combination of John Williams and the score. It was a very classy big album.

Norman Jewison

#8. You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history. Remember that while you're trying to decide what to do.

John Edward Williams

#9. To fight a war, you must believe it can accomplish something. We fight this one to save John's kingdom, or perhaps even to save all of mankind ... but isn't that what we always think? That all wars are useless - except the one we're fighting now?

Tad Williams

#10. Mrs. Bostwick's face was heavy and lethargic, without any strength or delicacy, and it bore the deep marks of what must have been a habitual dissatisfaction.

John Edward Williams

#11. For my friends do not desert me, and life stays; for those two things I must be grateful.

John Edward Williams

#12. I never suspected that we or any one person or program can create Serena Williams or John McEnroe or Pete Sampras.

Patrick McEnroe

#13. ...everything you say is a fact, but none of it is true

John Williams

#14. It was good of you to look for Quentin." "Good!" she exclaimed. "Good! O Anthony!" "Well, so it was," he answered. "Or good in you. How accurate one has to be with one's prepositions! Perhaps it was a preposition wrong that set the whole world awry." CHARLES WILLIAMS The Place of the Lion

John Piper

#15. No, sir, Stoner said, and the decisiveness of his voice surprised him. He thought with some wonder of the decision he had suddenly made.

John Edward Williams

#16. From the marriage had come only one child; he had wanted a son and had got a girl, and that was another disappointment he hardly bothered to conceal.

John Edward Williams

#17. Stoner saw them through a haze, as if he were an audience.

John Edward Williams

#18. I loved Western Swing and Hank Williams' music, and I now know that it's a 6th tuning that gives you all of those classic licks.

John Fogerty

#19. That the one could intensify the other had never occurred to them; and since the embodiment came before the recognition of the truth, it seemed a discovery that belonged to them alone.

John Edward Williams

#20. While they talked they remembered the years of their youth, and each thought of the other as he had been at another time.

John Edward Williams

#21. So I must be locked up, where I can be safely irresponsible, where I can do no harm.

John Williams

#22. One does not deceive oneself about the consequences of one's acts; one deceives oneself about the ease with which one can live with those consequences.

John Edward Williams

#23. My daddy, he was somewhere between God and John Wayne.

Hank Williams Jr.

#24. A man may live like a fool for a year, and become wise in a day.

John Williams

#25. And so, like many others, their honeymoon was a failure; yet they would not admit this to themselves, and they did not realize the significance of the failure until long afterward.

John Edward Williams

#26. Indeed, all of our past education will in some ways hinder us; for our habits of thinking about the nature of experience have determined our own expectations as radically as the habits of medieval man determined his.

John Edward Williams

#27. Rather awkwardly shy and therefore at times defensive and rather too assertive

John Edward Williams

#28. ...and he wondered if he appeared as ludicrous to others as he did to himself.

John Williams

#29. The iconoclasm need not be loud and messy, I can almost hear him saying,

John Edward Williams

#30. He listened to his words fall as if from the mouth of another, and watched his father's face, which received those words as a stone receives the repeated blows of a fist.

John Edward Williams

#31. Beneath his awe, he had a sudden sense of security and serenity he had never felt before.

John Edward Williams

#32. As if it were important, he strained his memory; beside the sofa there had been a large lamp with a round milk-white base encircled by a chain of painted roses, and beyond that, on the wall, neatly framed, was a series of water colors done by a forgotten aunt during her Grand Tour. But

John Edward Williams

#33. In preindustrial times, according to one study, inequality in landed property was greater in the Appalachian backcountry than anywhere else in America,

John Alexander Williams

#34. I'm not a frustrated concert composer, and the concert pieces I've done have been a small part of my work. What I've sought there is instruction, variation from the demands of film and relief from its restrictions.

John Williams

#35. And it occurred to him at last, with the finality of knowledge, that he had never known another human being with any intimacy or trust or with the human warmth of commitment.

John Edward Williams

#36. The worst kind of tyrant was the one who once had been the victim.

John A. Williams

#37. His mother regarded her life patiently, as if it were a long moment that she had to endure.

John Edward Williams

#38. A WEEK BEFORE commencement, at which Stoner was to receive his doctorate, Archer Sloane offered him a full-time instructorship at the University.

John Edward Williams

#39. They walked with some purpose, yet without particular hurry,

John Edward Williams

#40. Looking at her, Stoner was assailed by a consciousness of his own heavy clumsiness.

John Edward Williams

#41. William Stoner felt a kinship that he had not suspected; he knew that Lomax had gone through a kind of conversion, an epiphany of knowing something through words that could not be put in words,

John Edward Williams

#42. As a youngster, I never dreamed there could be a career actually earning a living writing music.

John Williams

#43. My God, to read without joy is stupid.

John Williams

#44. When he had thought of death before, he had thought of it either as a literary event or as the slow, quiet attrition of time against imperfect flesh.

John Edward Williams

#45. I tend to be a bitch when it's hot.

John A. Williams

#46. Pope John Paul, a man of peace and compassion, was one of the most revered leaders of our time.

Bill Williams

#47. To care not for one's self is of little moment, but to care not for those whom one has loved is another matter.

John Edward Williams

#48. He felt a renewal of the old passion for study and learning; and with the curious and disembodied vigor of the scholar that is the condition of neither youth nor age, he returned to the only life that had not betrayed him. He discovered that he had not gone far from that life even in his despair.

John Edward Williams

#49. She turned to him and pulled her lips in what he knew must be a smile. Not at all. I'm having a lovely time. Really.

John Edward Williams

#50. He thought of the years before, the distant years with his parents on the farm, and of the deadness from which he had been miraculously revived.

John Edward Williams

#51. But we were never really - together. Even when we made love.

John Edward Williams

#52. she had never been alone to care for her own self one day of her life, nor could it ever have occurred to her that she might become responsible for the well- being of another.

John Williams

#53. Finch turned to the other men and without raising his voice managed to call out to them.

John Edward Williams

#54. From a literary standpoint, I've been loving Raymond Carver's short stories, William Carlos Williams' poems, Richard Siken's 'Crush', John Fante, and Jim Harrison's book of ghazals. I love film and photography too, so many of my songs are very image rich from those influences.

Greta Salpeter

#55. It is fortunate that youth never recognizes its ignorance, for if it did it would not find the courage to get the habit of endurance. It is perhaps an instinct of the blood and flesh which prevents this knowledge and allows the boy to become the man who will live to see the folly of his existence.

John Edward Williams

#56. We need not forgive ourselves," he (Augustus) said. "It has been a marriage. It has been better than most.

John Williams

#57. Innocent of fashion or custom, they came to their studies as Stoner had dreamed that a student might
as if those studies were life itself and not specific means to specific ends.

John Edward Williams

#58. Sloane looked at him for a moment, his eyes bright and intent as they had been before the war. Then the film of indifference settled over them, and he turned away from Stoner and shuffled some papers on his desk.

John Edward Williams

#59. I am but God's finger, John. If he would condemn Elizabeth, she will be condemned.

Abigail Williams

#60. You mustn't give it up," he said, and his voice took on an urgency that he could not understand. "No matter how hard it will seem sometimes, you mustn't give it up. It's too good for you to give it up. Oh, it's good, there's no doubt of it.

John Williams

#61. a quotation from the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset as an epigraph for Stoner: "A hero is one who wants to be himself." In

John Williams

#62. You may need to refresh

John Williams

#63. He felt both shame and pride, and over it all a bitter disappointment, in himself and in the time and circumstance that made him possible.

John Williams

#64. Between the brutality that would sacrifice a single innocent life to a fear without a name, and the enlightenment that would sacrifice thousands of lives to a fear that we have named, I have found little to choose.

John Edward Williams

#65. For me, there is a strong family connection to Boston and anything connected to Boston, which includes Fenway.

John Williams

#66. John Irwin became one of the greatest peace workers in Northern Ireland.

Betty Williams

#67. I think of myself as a film composer.

John Williams

#68. Everybody who's anybody has been competitive and over-sensitive and a bit silly. Look at Paul McCartney, look at Elton John. They're jealous of Justin Timberlake. I'm sure they were jealous of me when I was in my imperial phase.

Robbie Williams

#69. They had forgiven themselves for the harm they had done each other, and they were rapt in a regard of what their life together might have been.

John Williams

#70. He did his work at the University as he did his work on the farm - thoroughly, conscientiously, with neither pleasure nor distress.

John Edward Williams

#71. There are occasionally eureka moments - off the top of my head, maybe Darth Vader's theme, you know, the imperial march.

John Williams

#72. But William Stoner knew of the world in a way that few of his younger colleagues could understand. Deep in him, beneath his memory, was the knowledge of hardship and hunger and endurance and pain.

John Edward Williams

#73. Middle age, my boy. No memory at all.

John Williams

#74. Like many men who consider their success incomplete, he was extraordinarily vain and consumed with a sense of his own importance.

John Edward Williams

#75. 'Angels in America' - which is composed of two three-hour plays, 'Millennium Approaches' and 'Perestroika' - proved to be a watershed drama, the most lyrical and ambitious augury of an era since Tennessee Williams's 'The Glass Menagerie.'

John Lahr

#76. To read without joy is stupid.

John Williams

#77. Will still support my weight, but it drags beneath me uselessly; and when I prick it with my stylus, there is the merest ghost of a pain. I still have not informed

John Edward Williams

#78. The coroner announced heart failure as the cause of death, but William Stoner always felt that in a moment of anger and despair Sloane had willed his heart to cease, as if in a last mute gesture of love and contempt for a world that had betrayed him so profoundly that he could not endure in it.

John Williams

#79. He continued, "I just want to say that your paper was the best discussion I know of the subject, and I'm grateful that you volunteered to give it.

John Williams

#80. He was forty-two years old, and he could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy and little behind him that he cared to remember.

John Edward Williams

#81. Begone, begone, you bloody whoreson Gauls!

John Williams

#82. 681Nor do you escape, my friend.No, indeed.You,too,are among the infirm- you are the dreamer,the madman in a madder world( ... )You're bright enough- ( ... ) But you have the taint,the old infirmity. You think there's something here,something to find. Well in the world,you'd learn soon enough.

John Edward Williams

#83. She has always seemed to me the epitome of womankind: coldly suspicious, politely ill-tempered, and narrowly selfish.

John Edward Williams

#84. He was our enemy, but as it is strange, after so many years the death of an old enemy is like the death of an old friend.

John Edward Williams

#85. In the University library he wandered through the stacks, among the thousands of books, inhaling the musty odor of leather, cloth, and drying page as if it were an exotic incense.

John Edward Williams

#86. I may have grown cynical from long service, but this is a tendency I do not like, and I sometimes think I'd rather be a dog and bay at the moon than stay in the Senate another six years and listen to it.

John Sharp Williams

#87. Tennessee Williams, one of my favorite playwrights, [lived] down there. You always heard about the Keys and how amazing they are and, well, it's like a highway with some bars on it.

John Leguizamo

#88. When at last he came to his decision, it seemed to him that he had known all along what it would be.

John Edward Williams

#89. Busying herself with inconsequential tasks.

John Edward Williams

#90. but his long thin fingers moved with grace and persuasion, as if giving to the words a shape that his voice could not.

John Williams

#91. Perhaps you were right after all, my dear Nicolaus; perhaps there is but one god. But if that is true, you have misnamed him. He is Accident, and his priest is man, and that priest's only victim must be at last himself, his poor divided self.

John Edward Williams

#92. Working in Hollywood for the orchestra world is a very time consuming and laborious job.

John Williams

#93. Some kids, for some reason, it just doesn't click in the classroom as they need it to. We have college coaches talk to them, former high school athletes, motivational speakers, teachers, principals.

John Williams

#94. The dying are selfish, he thought; they want their moments to themselves, like children.

John Edward Williams

#95. Talent grips us. We are overtaken by the beauty of Michelangelo's sculpture, riveted by Mariah Carey's angelic voice, doubled over in laughter by the comedy of Robin Williams, and captivated by the on screen performances of Denzel Washington.

John C. Maxwell

#96. So the bed that had been the arena of their passion became the support of her illness.

John Williams

#97. Lust and learning. That's really all there is, isn't it?

John Edward Williams

#98. Deliberately, as if committing himself to something, he stepped forward and walked down the path to the porch and knocked on the front door.

John Edward Williams

#99. A writer worth his salt is not going to write about how damned lovely it is; it isn't, that's why so many people tell themselves it is [lovely].

John A. Williams

#100. Being asked to play one of the butlers is like being picked to play for England. All you have to do is think of the great butlers from the past - Terry-Thomas in 'How To Murder Your Wife,' John Gielgud in 'Arthur' and Denholm Elliott in 'Trading Places.'

Mark Williams