The values that I have are the values I was raised with, from where I’m from, which is a middle-class place. So that informs everything about me, my politics and all that stuff. I mean, politically, I vote against my own self-interest at every election. I actively ask these people to raise my taxes.
I was very, very religious. And of course I wrote about it in ‘Night.’ I questioned God’s silence. So I questioned. I don’t have an answer for that. Does it mean that I stopped having faith? No. I have faith, but I question it.
Winning doesn’t always mean being first. Winning means you’re doing better than you’ve ever done before.
I think that there is something beautiful about mortality. It makes our decisions mean more.
Old music used to mean something. There is none of that today.
Relationships with people in general, in no matter what capacity, are something that’s very emotional. They mean a lot to you. I think having eyes on that in a critical way can be really tough.
Just because somebody wants to be alone sometimes, it doesn’t mean they don’t love you.
The sofa is a really important investment for anybody, and I don’t mean financially. You need to find a really great sofa that can transition with you, and you can build from there.
Does being practical mean we prop up a legal system that’s unfair, that bears its weight down on black men and black women, and by extension if you are Hispanic or indigenous or poor? Does being practical mean you don’t say to the American people you deserve better than you’re getting? That’s not the practical we want.
I once took a workshop with Jim Shepard, and he has this term, ‘rate-of-revelation,’ that has come to mean a lot to me: ‘the pace at which we’re learning crucial emotional information about the stories’ central figures.’ An ever-increasing rate-of-revelation is good; a stagnant r-of-r is not.
It’s so unfortunate because people have become so comfortable being mean.
I’ve had lots of parts in movies that I’ve never seen. I mean no disrespect to them. It was really fun to go act, but I’m not calling my friends and saying, ‘I couldn’t be more proud of this picture. You should go see it.’
My interesting diet tips are eat early and don’t nosh between meals. I mean, I can pack it away.
When you say you agree to a thing in principle you mean that you have not the slightest intention of carrying it out in practice.
The computer is my favourite invention. I feel lucky to be part of the global village. I don’t mean to brag, but I’m so fast with technology. People think it all seems too much, but we’ll get used to it. I’m sure it all seemed too much when we were learning to walk.
It’s difficult for me to really temper my personality, but I am trying to be a little more sensible about it. If I really lose my temper, I go to my room and scream and shout, but I try not to lose it on people any more. I’ve never said something mean just like that. I’ve only said things in retaliation.
Just because something doesn’t do what you planned it to do doesn’t mean it’s useless.
Being an artist doesn’t just mean you have a song. That doesn’t make you an artist. The word ‘artist’ means so many different things, and I feel like to be a real one, you really have to do it all. The people that I think of as artists – Tyler the Creator, Childish Gambino, Kanye West – are doing the most.
Just as ‘Islam’ literally means ‘peace,’ none of the 99 names of Allah mean violence. Similarly, every religion in the world stands for peace, compassion, and brotherhood.
We are in niche consumption mode, but ‘niche’ doesn’t mean ‘small’ anymore. Niche can mean focused, and particularly with the Web, which is a global audience… you can have something niche and still get 10 to 15 million views.
Now, as far as I know, nobody has ever put up the U.S.’s nuclear missiles on the Internet. I mean, it’s not something I’ve heard about.
I was skint, and I had to move back to my mum and dad’s house, back into the room I shared with my brother when I was a kid. I kept getting people on the streets telling me that they loved me; it didn’t mean anything to me because I was still borrowing tenners off my pensioner father to go and get some chicken.
There is something so mean and unmanly in the arts of dissimulation and falsehood that I am surprised they can be used by anyone in so noble, so generous a passion as virtuous love.
My friends have said, ‘Wait, you’re pretty, and you sing? What do you mean you’re interested in science?’ I have to just hold my head and go, ‘Do you hear yourself?’ By no means should you ever limit yourself because of what others think or because of their perceptions of what someone looks like in a certain field.
Presents don’t really mean much to me. I don’t want to sound mawkish, but – it was the realization that I have a great many people in my life who really love me, and who I really love.
I don’t like country music, but I don’t mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means ‘put down’.
Follow your instincts. Do the kind of writing you love to do and do best. ‘Stiff’ was an oddball book – I mean, a funny book about cadavers? – and I worried that it would be too unconventional. In the end, that’s what has made it a success, I think.
A major focus of ‘Reality Hunger’ is appropriation and plagiarism and what these terms mean. I can hardly treat the topic deeply without engaging in it. That would be like writing a book about lying and not being permitted to lie in it.
The only reality is our society, and I mean this seriously, Western Society is a very sick society.
If I were a black liberal, I would be hailed, I guess. But I’m not. I mean, I think for myself. I want to make my own decisions.
Rejection doesn’t always mean I’m not good enough.
In real life, I’m so goofy and super weird. I’m never mean, but people don’t see the weird side of me. Like, I’ll be dancing around. My best friends will always say that they wish others saw that side of me, when I’m doing a weird dance or weird faces or voices.
I mean there’s something I have achieved in life, even if it’s little, and if people write about it, then it’s fine.
What about the hero of The House on the Strand? What did it mean when he dropped the telephone at the end of the book? I don’t really know, but I rather think he was going to be paralysed for life. Don’t you?
This country is in a crisis. And if you’re fighting to save this country, if you’re fighting to take this country back, it’s not going to be sunshine and patriots. It’s going to be people who want to fight. I mean, Andrew Breitbart was all about the fight.
It’s just so cool when you meet people who are different than you are. That can give you a different perspective, a viewpoint on life, or inspire you. I mean, what would the world be like if we were all the same? I think it would be very boring.
I keep saying this, and I truly mean this: I think that when you experience true love, it never really goes away.
Fleabag knows men and women are equal and should be treated as such, but what she’s confused about – and what I was confused about – was the idea that wanting bigger boobs doesn’t mean you don’t want equal rights.
The cookie-cutter liberal, the standard operating procedure liberal, is really a giant ignoramus. I mean that seriously. They’re really ignorant.
I spent a lot of time protecting myself. I mean, I’ve met a lot of extraordinary people over the years – and I just wish I had been able to open myself up to them more.
Computers are hierarchical. We have a desktop and hierarchical files which have to mean everything.
Excellence, then, is a state concerned with choice, lying in a mean, relative to us, this being determined by reason and in the way in which the man of practical wisdom would determine it.
What does immortality mean to me? That we all want more time; and we want it to be quality time.
I’m a gemini, and I get so bored so easily. I mean, I have moved six times in the last eight years.
When Jesus says you must leave your family to follow Him, he doesn’t necessarily mean physically. He means leave your dependence on them, make an emotional break with them.
I think when people mean that Discworld books have become darker they really mean the series is growing up. In ‘The Colour of Magic’ most of the city is set alight. It’s a joke, in much the same way that the Earth is destroyed almost at the start of Douglas Adams’s ‘The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.’
I was a young actor who was bald, but at that time, there was a thing on television that – there was a prototype or a stereotype of a principal who was bald and mean with glasses, or there was… the angry boss who was bald.
What’s better? Dogs or broomsticks? I mean will the world really ever know?
I don’t love Photoshop; I like imperfection. It doesn’t mean ugly. I love a girl with a gap between her teeth, versus perfect white veneers. Perfection is just… boring. Perfect is what’s natural or real; that is beauty.
When I say, ‘I stand for equal rights,’ I mean equal rights for all persons… from the moment of conception until natural death. I mean that I believe in the equal human dignity of all persons, no matter the ‘contribution’ they make to society.
Just like football, business is a game of inches, where the smallest advancement or advantage can mean the difference between winning and losing.
