“You ask me what's happened in my life, why and how I did this and that. And I think and tell, but it's never true story, because everything is so much more complicated, and also I can't even remember how things happened. Whole process is boring. Also false, but mostly boring.”
As quoted in "Profile: The Soloist" by Joan Acoccella, in The New Yorker (January 19, 1998); reprinted in Life Stories: Profiles from The New Yorker https://books.google.com/books?id=KDhjzXAjyUMC&pg=PA62 (2000), edited by David Remnick, p. 62.
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Mikhail Baryshnikov 9
Soviet-American dancer, choreographer, and actor born in Le… 1948Related quotes
“Why is life so complicated….?' I asked.
'To keep us from being bored,' he said.”
Source: Dangerously Alice
Morning in the Burned House (1995), The Loneliness of the Military Historian
Context: Instead of this, I tell
what I hope will pass as truth.
A blunt thing, not lovely.
The truth is seldom welcome,
especially at dinner,
though I am good at what I do.
My trade is courage and atrocities.
I look at them and do not condemn.
I write things down the way they happened,
as near as can be remembered.
I don’t ask why, because it is mostly the same.
Wars happen because the ones who start them
think they can win.
“Can we drop the ‘artificial intelligence’? It’s a bit like me calling you a meat-based processing system.”
Source: On the Steel Breeze (2013), Chapter 29 (p. 312)
Source: Generation A (2009), p. 177
Quote of John Cage: the first lines of his 'Autobiographical Statement', April, 1990 http://www.johncage.org/autobiographical_statement.html
1990s
So I often reply to myself, and there rises before me my special nightmare—that of the writer as craftsman, natty and deft.
Letter 104, to Forrest Reid, 19 June 1912
Selected Letters (1983-1985)
