New York Times Interview Quotes & Sayings

Too many lives go up in smoke - It's nice to laugh but don't be the joke. — Janet Jackson

The power in any society is with those who get to impose the fantasy. It is no longer, as it was for centuries throughout Europe, the church that imposes its fantasy on the populace, nor is it the totalitarian superstate that imposes the fantasy, as it did for 12 years in Nazi Germany and for 69 years in the Soviet Union. Now the fantasy that prevails is the all-consuming, voraciously consumed popular culture, seemingly spawned by, of all things, freedom. The young especially live according to the beliefs that are thought up for them by the society's most unthinking people and by businesses least impeded by innocent ends. Ingeniously as their parents and teachers may attempt to protect the young from being drawn, to their detriment, into the moronic amusement park that is now universal, the preponderance of the power is not with them. — Philip Roth

I was watching Booknotes on CSPAN the other day and got caught up in an interview with a literary critic from the New York Times.The interviewer asked the critic why he thought the Harry Potter series was selling so many copies. "Wish fulfillment," the critic answered. He said the lead character in the book could wave a wand and make things happen, and this is one of the primary fantasies of the human heart. I think this is true. I call it "Clawing for Eden."But the Bible says Eden is gone, and as much as we want to believe we can fix our lives in about as many steps as it takes to make a peanut-butter sandwich, I don't believe we can. — Donald Miller

That's the way you have to be with boys," said Betsy. "Beam about their old football when you're dying to know whether they're going to take you to a party. — Maud Hart Lovelace

We rule out raising taxes this year. — Luis De Guindos

I met Peter Brook, the theater director, who's been based in Paris for many years at the Bouffes du Nord. I admire him tremendously. Some years ago, he was in New York, and he gave an interview with The Times, and what he said was this: "In my work, I try to capture the closeness of the everyday and the distance of myth. Because, without the closeness, you can't be moved, and without the distance, you can't be amazed." Isn't that extraordinary? — Paul Auster

Love is the only flower that grows and blossoms without the aid of the seasons — Kahlil Gibran

On January 7, 1973, the New York Times featured an interview with one of the nation's top financial forecasters, who urged investors to buy stocks without hesitation: "It's very rare that you can be as unqualifiedly bullish as you can now." That forecaster was named Alan Greenspan, and it's very rare that anyone has ever been so unqualifiedly wrong as the future Federal Reserve chairman was that day: 1973 and 1974 turned out to be the worst years for economic growth and the stock market since the Great Depression. — Benjamin Graham

Donald Trump claims - he did interview after the debate where he said, well, gosh, you can't find Americans to do these jobs to be waiters or waitresses or bellhops.What ridiculous nonsense. "The New York Times" reported roughly 300 Americans applied for those jobs. He only hired 17. Instead, he brought in foreign workers, because they're captive workers, because you can pay them less because they can't leave. — Ted Cruz

We can begin the process of making community wherever we are. We can begin by sharing a smile, a warm greeting, a bit of conversation; by doing a kind deed or by acknowledging kindness offered to us. Doing this we engage in love practice [...] we lay foundation for the building of community with strangers. The love we make in community stays with us wherever we go. With this knowledge as our guide, we make any place we go, a place where we return to love. — Bell Hooks

I know I'm not going to write as well as I used to. I no longer have the stamina to endure the frustration. Writing is frustration - it's daily frustration, not to mention humiliation. It's just like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time." He went on: "I can't face any more days when I write five pages and throw them away. I can't do that anymore.
New York Times, 18 Nov. 2012 — Philip Roth

When Caroline Kennedy managed to say 'you know' more than 200 times in an interview with the New York 'Daily News,' and on 130 occasions while talking to 'The New York Times' during her uninspired attempt to become a hereditary senator, she proved, among other things, that she was (a) middle-aged and (b) middle class. — Christopher Hitchens

My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21. Everything since then has been a bonus.
[The Science of Second-Guessing (New York Times Magazine Interview, December 12, 2004)] — Stephen Hawking

When music dies, it's like my soul left my body. — Kristine

That's still the best reading experience: falling in love with a book I meet by accident. — Alice Hoffman

But what was a body? Dust, dung, urine, itches. It was the light within which was important, and it was not significant if that light endured after death, or if the soul was blinded eternally in the endless night of the suspired flesh. — Taylor Caldwell

A recent example of the racial reconciliation paradigm at work is the #AllLivesMatter retort. In an interview in The New York Times, philosopher Judith Butler unpacked the problem: If we jump too quickly to the universal formulation, "all lives matter," then we miss the fact that black people have not yet been included in the idea of "all lives." That said, it is true that all lives matter (we can then debate about when life begins or ends). But to make that universal formulation concrete, to make that into a living formulation, one that truly extends to all people, we have to foreground those lives that are not mattering now, to mark that exclusion, and militate against it.113 — Robert P. Jones

When I read the Bhagavad-Gita and reflect about how God created this universe everything else seems so superfluous — Albert Einstein

When you look at what C.S. Lewis is saying, his message is so anti-life, so cruel, so unjust. The view that the Narnia books have for the material world is one of almost undisguised contempt. At one point, the old professor says, 'It's all in Plato' - meaning that the physical world we see around us is the crude, shabby, imperfect, second-rate copy of something much better. I want to emphasize the simple physical truth of things, the absolute primacy of the material life, rather than the spiritual or the afterlife.

[The New York Times interview, 2000] — Philip Pullman

This American system of ours', he shouted, 'call it Americanism, call it capitalism, call it what you like, gives to each and every one of us a great opportunity if only we seize it with both hands, and make the most of it'. A month later in New York I was telling this story to Mr John Walter, minority owner of The Times. He asked me why I had not written the Capone interview for the paper. I explained that when I had come to put my notes together, I saw that most of what Capone had said was in essence identical with what was being said in the leading articles of The Times itself, and I doubted whether the paper would be best pleased to find itself seeing eye to eye with the most notorious gangster in Chicago. — Claud Cockburn

Nearly every writer writes a book with a great amount of attention and intention and hopes and dreams. And it's important to take that effort seriously and to recognize that a book may have taken ten years of a writer's life, that the writer has put heart and soul into it. And it behooves us, as book-review-editors, to treat those books with the care and attention they deserve, and to give the writer that respect."
Pamela Paul, New York Times Book Review editor, in a Poets & Writer's interview
(something for all reviewers to think about) — Madeline Sharples

When writing is great, Mitchell told me of the books he loved as a reader, your mind is nowhere else but in this world that started off in the mind of another human being. There are two miracles at work here. One, that someone thought of that world and people in the first place. And the second, that there's this means of transmitting it. Just little ink marks on squashed wood fiber. Bloody amazing. — David Mitchell

I will seek out a face, a composed, a monumental face, and will endow it with omniscience, and wear it under my dress like a talisman and then (I promise this) I will find some dingle in a wood where I can display my assortment of strange, valuable objects. I promise myself this. So I will not cry.
-Virginia Woolf, The Waves — Virginia Woolf