Lurie Quotes & Sayings

When I first got sick, they told me I had a year to live, and I was writing my memoir really fast. There were really weird things happening with my nervous system and my heart and stuff, and it didn't look like I was gonna make it, so I was writing really fast, and then I couldn't write anymore. — John Lurie

I remember seeing McCoy Tyner in concert, and thinking that the music was incredible, but wanting to be invited in. I figured that humor was the way of letting the audience in. I've gotten a hard time about it, but I love to be funny onstage. — John Lurie

I will go wherever the truth leads me. It is secular scholarship, Rebbe; it is not the scholarship of tradition. In secular scholarship there are no boundaries and no permanently fixed views.
Lurie, if the Torah cannot go out into your world of scholarship and return stronger, then we are all fools and charlatans. I have faith in the Torah. I am not afraid of truth. — Chaim Potok

Disgrace is a subtle, multi-layered story, as much concerned with politics as it is with the itch of male flesh. Coetzee's prose is chaste and lyrical without being self- conscious: it is a relief to encounter writing as quietly stylish as this. I was not totally convinced by Lurie's musical abilities, with regard to his proposed opera, but that is my sole complaint. — Paul Bailey

You have heard me say many times that I want strong leaders who feel free to express their opinions. — Jeffrey Lurie

I've lived through a lot of division championships, a lot of final-four appearances, but our goal is further than that. We want to deliver a Super Bowl. — Jeffrey Lurie

You never want to plateau out. Getting better every day is my expectation. — Jeffrey Lurie

Nature can seem cruel, but she balances her books. — Alison Lurie

We can lie in the language of dress or try to tell the truth; but unless we are naked and bald, it is impossible to be silent. — Alison Lurie

There is a peculiar burning odor in the room, like explosives. the kitchen fills with smoke and the hot, sweet, ashy smell of scorched cookies. The war has begun. — Alison Lurie

Most of the great works of juvenile literature are subversive in one way or another: they express ideas and emotions not generally approved of or even recognized at the time; they make fun of honored figures and piously held beliefs; and they view social pretenses with clear-eyed directness, remarking - as in Andersen's famous tale - that the emperor has no clothes. — Alison Lurie

But I think that sometimes, when one's behaved like a rather second-rate person, the way I did at breakfast, then in a kind of self-destructive shock one goes and does something really second-rate. Almost as if to prove it ... — Alison Lurie

There's a rule, I think. You get what you want in life, but not your second choice too. — Alison Lurie

In a sense much great literature is subversive, since its very existence implies that what matters is art, imagination, and truth. In what we call the real world, on the other hand, what usually counts is money, power, and public success. — Alison Lurie

I'm an owner that tends to absolutely be supportive of a coach and his vision if it's a real sharp and smart vision. I really believe in that. — Jeffrey Lurie

Many Americans think of the rest of the world as a kind of Disneyland, a showplace for quaint fauna, flora and artifacts. They dress for travel in cheap, comfortable, childish clothes, as if they were going to the zoo and would not be seen by anyone except the animals. — Alison Lurie

As one went to Europe to see the living past, so one must visit Southern California to observe the future. — Alison Lurie

Brian knows the affair is wrong. He's known from the moment Wendy first undressed in his office. But with her hot, wet tongue in his ear, and her taut, pink nipples straining against his starched white shirt, and with Mick Jagger's strident voice squawking about satisfaction on the tiny transistor radio, Brian's body refuses to obey.
Instead of shoving Wendy out the door, he shoves her onto the unmade bed. — Alison Lurie

Outsourcing isn't the answer to everything. Lots of internet marketing pundits will tell you to outsource, outsource, outsource. Having a trusted team that knows each other and enjoys working together is good, too. — Ian Lurie

The thing with sculpture is, 90% of the time, when I pass a piece of sculpture, it's in public or somewhere, and it's just, how inconvenient that that's there. It takes up so much room, and it's so oppressive. — John Lurie

Other than my family and my close friends, there's nothing I love more than owning the team and doing everything I can to make it a success. That's how I live. That is me. — Jeffrey Lurie

I guess I just want everything to be available immediately. — John Lurie

I played with Eddie Taylor's son, Tim Taylor and Carey Bells son Lurie Bell. — Jimmy Smith

I had a mystical experience when I was in my late teens, early 20s, and I spent years trying to recapture that. — John Lurie

I've had encounters with animals that have been really mystical. I've always been really into animals. But the way they appear in the paintings, they come from my mind's eye more than: 'I'm gonna draw a dog now.' It isn't thought out: 'Now I'm gonna draw a bird.' They just appear. — John Lurie

Even when we say nothing our clothes are talking noisily to everyone who sees us, telling them who we are, where we come from, what we like to do in bed and a dozen other intimate things ... — Alison Lurie

We all want to be guilty, because guilt is power. — Alison Lurie

If someone who knows what's going on comes up and says they liked the music, I appreciate that. — John Lurie

Attempts to limit female mobility by hampering locomotion are ancient and almost universal. The foot-binding of upper-class Chinese girls and the Nigerian custom of loading women's legs with pounds of heavy brass wire are extreme examples, but all over the world similar stratagems have been employed to make sure that once you have caught a woman she cannot run away, and even if she stays around she cannot keep up with you ... Literally as well as figuratively modern women's shoes are what keeps Samantha from running as fast as Sammy. — Alison Lurie

But, you know, I'd be happy just making music. — John Lurie

Real literature, like travel, is always a surprise. — Alison Lurie

You can't write well with only the nice parts of your character, and only about nice things. And I don't want even to try anymore. I want to use everything, including hate and envy and lust and fear. — Alison Lurie

If nothing will finally survive of life besides what artists report of it, we have no right to report what we know to be lies. — Alison Lurie

The loss of music is very painful, and I don't revisit stuff unless there is a solid reason to do it. — John Lurie

When I was about 17 I knew that I was going to be serious about music. Before that I thought, fairly certainly, that I would be a writer. Before that, I thought I would be a forward in the NBA. And before that I thought that I would own a snake farm. — John Lurie

The only model to me that correlates with big success in the NFL is having a Hall of Fame franchise quarterback. — Jeffrey Lurie

In the normal process of evaluating the end of the season, I meet with key executives for thorough discussions and evaluations of all aspects of football operations. — Jeffrey Lurie

Other wars end eventually in victory, defeat or exhaustion, but the war between men and women goes on forever. — Alison Lurie

Kenny G is not real jazz. I don't even think Wynton Marsalis is real jazz. I don't think Harry Connick Jr. is real jazz. If there is such a thing as real jazz, The Lounge Lizards is real jazz, Henry Threadgill is real jazz, Bill Frisell is real jazz, you know? — John Lurie

Though most tourists accepted the occasional comic misadventure, it was important to them that overall their vacation should be pleasant. When you spend money on a holiday you are essentially purchasing happiness: if you don't enjoy yourself you will feel defrauded. — Alison Lurie

What we do at the end of every season - which is why it's probably not the greatest idea to talk about things in the visitor's locker room after the final game - we sit down and have real serious conversations with all of the senior people. — Jeffrey Lurie

The great subversive works of children's literature suggest that there are other views of human life besides those of the shopping mall and the corporation. They mock current assumptions and express the imaginative, unconventional, noncommercial view of the world in its simplest and purest form. They appeal to the imaginative, questioning, rebellious child within all of us, renew our instinctive energy, and act as a force for change. This is why such literature is worthy of our attention and will endure long after more conventional tales have been forgotten. — Alison Lurie

[Public housing projects] are not lacking in natural leaders,' [Ellen Lurie, a social worker in East Harlem] says. 'They contain people with real ability, wonderful people many of them, but the typical sequence is that in the course of organization leaders have found each other, gotten all involved in each others' social lives, and have ended up talking to nobody but each other. They have not found their followers. Everything tends to degenerate into ineffective cliques, as a natural course. There is no normal public life. Just the mechanics of people learning what s going on is so difficult. It all makes the simplest social gain extra hard for these people. — Jane Jacobs

I'd always maintained an image so that people wouldn't approach me. — John Lurie

To be better than 31 other teams, you better be a really good team. It's just not about one person. — Jeffrey Lurie

Fashion is free speech, and one of the privileges, if not always one of the pleasures, of a free world — Alison Lurie

Learn to love the data and, for heaven's sake, write well. — Ian Lurie

You get into the habit of being angry and hurt by life, and then when something good happens you can't accept it because it doesn't fit the pattern. — Alison Lurie

The fashion industry is no more able to preserve a style that men and women have decided to abandon than to introduce one they do not choose to accept. — Alison Lurie

A reckoning is coming on the state of the internet journalism, because right now, the way it's set up, there is so much room for libel to squeak through that you're going to see ... they're going to rewrite the rule book on journalism very soon. They have to, because the bloggers are getting away with so much rumor-mongering about public officials and even private figures because they don't have editors and they don't have fact checkers and they don't have lawyers. There is going to be a price to pay somewhere down the line. — Rod Lurie

I don't really worry about the weather ... as long as you have good access to the stadium, that's the one thing you worry about. — Jeffrey Lurie

The better quarterbacks are real consistent. Rookie quarterbacks are not. — Jeffrey Lurie

Grosvenor and Burke suggest that continually, though silently, a school building tells students who they are and how they should think about the world. It can help to manufacture rote obedience or independent activity; it can create high self-confidence or low self-esteem. — Alison Lurie

I play music, I paint - these things come from your depths. — John Lurie

The fashion pages of magazines such as Cosmopolitan now seem to specialize in telling the career girl what to wear to charm the particular wrong type of man who reads Playboy, while the editorial pages tell her how to cope with the resulting psychic damage. — Alison Lurie

You learn quite a bit about your film from test screening audiences. With both comedies and movies that are intense, you need to calibrate the film and see how audiences react. — Rod Lurie

If I were to describe myself as any particular type of owner, it would be a fans' owner because you really get great satisfaction when you can go out on the streets and scream you're No. 1 and you're world champions. — Jeffrey Lurie

In other spheres of Victorian Society the appeal of a young woman dressed in black from head to toe was acknowledged. In Victorian popular culture, widows had two manifestations: the battleaxe and the man-eater, preying upon husbands and bachelors alike. Even today, an attractive, dark-haired person dressed in all black has vampiric connotations, as the novelist Alison Lurie has noted, 'so archetypally terrifying and thrilling, that any black-haired, pale-complexioned man or woman who appears clad in all black formal clothes projects a destructive eroticism, sometimes without concious intention. — Catharine Arnold

When you inherit a franchise that won one playoff game in the last 10 years, you've inherited a troubled franchise. — Jeffrey Lurie

You can always argue you're never good enough until you win the Super Bowl. And even then, you're going to lose players, and you're not good enough then, either. — Jeffrey Lurie

She'll be apples — April Lurie

power-hungry man — Leslie Gilbert-Lurie

You notice it with any organization that's had a lot of success: you will start to reach thinking, 'That's the player, that's the method, that's the mechanism, that's the coach, that's the thing that's going to put us over the top.' — Jeffrey Lurie

My musical education started in the limelight, because I found myself surrounded by real musicians, but after my career had taken off. — John Lurie

I think at the end of season you really learn exactly how you might become better. — Jeffrey Lurie

I think that man is conditioned to violence. — Rod Lurie

What I believe to be jazz is constructed and improvised music which is in the air right now. But I don't think that's most people's definition of jazz, you know? We don't know what we're talking about, because we don't know the definition. — John Lurie

What do you know about music? You're not a lawyer. — John Lurie

With a pencil and paper, I could revise the world. — Alison Lurie

America has a history of political isolation and economic self-sufficiency; its citizens have tended to regard the rest of the world as a disaster area from which lucky or pushy people emigrate to the Promised Land. — Alison Lurie

As an owner, you have a choice. Do you want to adopt a vision that you think is real sharp and real cutting edge and could get you from good to great - has a chance - or do you want to just say the organization is not about that, and we're not going to try to adopt a new coaching philosophy and vision. — Jeffrey Lurie

The owner always has the final say. You have to decide who is going to be the best fit for the organization. — Jeffrey Lurie

If you can have a really good coaching staff, and you can have a really good young quarterback and do a really good job in player personnel and string together multiple successful drafts, your window is not small in the NFL because of the quarterback. — Jeffrey Lurie

I want to have a movie where people's eyes are glued to the screen, not when they're running from the screen. — Rod Lurie

The head coach is the chemist. — Jeffrey Lurie

If we are committed to true, meaningful growth, then, work is a deeply spiritual environment where, through our actions, we can implement our obligations to others, build our confidence and sense of purpose, practice our commitment to the truth, strengthen our inherent optimism, experience gratitude, and live with a greater sense of balance. So, do you still think that your job is not spiritual? The — Alan Lurie

It seems like there are always gatekeepers. People between you and the people who are moved by your work. They often make a beautiful thing creepy. — John Lurie

We say something every morning when we decide how to dress. — Alison Lurie

I've been through this fame thing before, when the band was big in '80, '81. — John Lurie

If you had to point to anything, it's when you've had as much success as we've had and are so close to winning a Super Bowl, at some stage you have an opportunity to think the next move, even if it's not consistent with all your previous moves, will be the one that gives you the chance to win the Lombardi Trophy. — Jeffrey Lurie

I think when you have strong leadership at the coaching level and you empower the coach and the coaching staff, you have a lot more stability. — Jeffrey Lurie

I can think of no other writer who so thoroughly embodies the Jamesian spirit as Alison Lurie. Like him she can excavate all the possibilities of a theme. Like his, her books seem long, unbroken threads, seamless progressions of effects. — Edmund White