Weiner Quotes & Sayings

That's the miracle of telling a story in film: You can express something inside someone's mind. — Matthew Weiner

Ruut Veenhoven, keeper of the database, got it right when he said: "Happiness requires livable conditions, but not paradise." We humans are imminently adaptable. We survived an Ice Age. We can survive anything. We find happiness in a variety of places and, as the residents of frumpy Slough demonstrated, places can change. Any atlas of bliss must be etched in pencil. — Eric Weiner

It's just you and the track and the clock. It's the most elemental thing there is-the simplest and the hardest. No everybody is cut out for it. — Jennifer Weiner

How do you find happiness in a body like yours ... like mine? How do you find courage to follow anything anywhere if you don't feel like you fit in the world? — Jennifer Weiner

I've always been interested in the economics of reproduction, who gets what they want when it comes to childbearing and how these days, money is a tremendous advantage. — Jennifer Weiner

Sooner or later they are going to live in a New York City where gay marriage is not only legal, but it's common and they don't even notice. — Anthony Weiner

But I'll tell you a secret. You know what boys like? A woman who's happy with herself. Who's not making herself miserable with the Jane Fonda videotapes and complaining all the time about whether this part or that one's too big. And you know what else they like? She leaned in close, whispering into her granddaughter's ear. Good food. — Jennifer Weiner

Hotels are wonderful inventions, but they are not the ideal window to the soul of a nation. — Eric Weiner

The British academic Richard Schoch, in his book The Secrets of Happiness, put it this way: "Your imagination must, to some extent, be found in a realm beyond reason because it begins with imagining a future reality: the self that you might become. — Eric Weiner

Geniuses are always marginalized to one degree or another. Someone wholly invested in the status quo is unlikely to disrupt it. — Eric Weiner

The spectacle of the United States Army chasing the unarmed veterans, their wives, and their children out of the shadow of the Capitol was a scene of American urban combat without parallel since the Civil War. — Tim Weiner

Socrates pioneered conversation as a means of intellectual exploration, of questioning assumptions, ones so deeply ingrained we dont even know we have them. — Eric Weiner

Identity is part of drama to me. Who am I, why am I behaving this way, and am I aware of it? — Matthew Weiner

The word "utopia" has two meanings. It means both "good place" and "nowhere". That's the way it should be. The happiest places, I think, are the ones that reside just this side of paradise. The perfect person would be insufferable to live with; likewise, we wouldn't want to live in the perfect place, either. "A life time of happiness! No man could bear it: It would be hell on earth," wrote George Bernard Shaw, in his play Man and Superman. — Eric Weiner

Unlike the Man with No Cell Phone, the Man Who Can See around Corners owns several, which he places on the table, like talismans. So far, so good. But you can imagine my disappointment when he promptly disabuses me of this seeing-around-corners stuff. "That's all bullshit," he says. — Eric Weiner

line. Creativity is a response to our environment. Greek painting was a response to the complex light (the Greek painter Apollodoros was the first to develop a technique for creating the illusion of depth), Greek architecture a response to the complex landscape, Greek philosophy a response to the complex, uncertain times. The problem with paradise is that it is perfect and therefore requires no response. This is why wealthy people and places often stagnate. Athens — Eric Weiner

he believes it is, overall, a wiser approach to life's problems. After all, how can you pick up something new - a new career, a new relationship, a new outlook on life - without first letting go of the old? It's like trying to pick up a bag of groceries when your hands are already full. — Eric Weiner

GDP doesn't register, as Robert Kennedy put it, "the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, or the intelligence of our public debate." GDP measures everything, Kennedy concluded, "except that which makes life worthwhile." Nor does GDP take into account unpaid work, the so-called compassionate economy. — Eric Weiner

Super-confident people with no problems and great marriages and great parenting are not good entertainment. — Matthew Weiner

Born on third base and think they hit a triple, — Jennifer Weiner

Last Friday night, I Twitted a photograph of myself that I intended to send as a direct message as part of a joke to a woman in Seattle. Once I realized I posted to Twitter I panicked, I took it down and said that I had been hacked. I then continued with that story, to stick to that story which was a hugely regrettable mistake. — Anthony Weiner

I wished that my job was baking muffins in a muffin shop, where all I'd have to do was crack eggs and measure flour and make change, and nobody could abuse me, and where they'd even expect me to be fat. Every flab roll and cellulite crinkle would serve as testimony to the excellence of my baked goods — Jennifer Weiner

I am here today to again apologize for the personal mistakes I have made and the embarrassment I have caused. I make this apology to my neighbors and my constituents, but I make it particularly to my wife, Huma. — Anthony Weiner

If you write thrillers or mysteries or horror fiction or quote-unquote speculative fiction, men might read you, and the 'Times' might notice you. — Jennifer Weiner

I didn't trust people who forgot to eat. — Jennifer Weiner

My wife's an architect, so she definitely has a very high-risk artistic profession, and she gets the idea that you're really sensitive, you really care what people think, you have a low threshold for criticism. — Matthew Weiner

seventeen, tells her — Jennifer Weiner

Trying to make certain things on the Internet totally private unless you subscribe. It's not going to work. If you can figure out how to close something down, somebody can figure out how to open it up. That's art. — Lawrence Weiner

When it comes to men, it's often easier done than said. — Michele Weiner-Davis

As nice as some of the booths are, it's not the same thing. It's a pity for young artists, because one of the things that a younger artist can look forward to is an emerging dealer who has a space that they can take over and build whatever will suit whatever aesthetic they find themselves in. In an art fair, you turn yourself into an object. — Lawrence Weiner

Brainstorming sounds like a great idea, but it doesn't work. Dozens of studies have demonstrated this conclusively. People produce more good ideas - twice as many - alone than they do together. One problem with brainstorming is — Eric Weiner

In other words, where we are is vital to who we are. By "where," I'm speaking not only of our physical environment but also of our cultural environment. Culture is the sea we swim in - so pervasive, so all-consuming, that we fail to notice its existence until we step out of it. It matters more than we think. — Eric Weiner

Someone like Mozart moves from Salzburg to Vienna, where all of the sudden he finds this musical city that is not only asking for music, it's demanding music of him. — Eric Weiner

The CIA officer at the black site relayed the report to his headquarters. The CIA's director, George Tenet, was unhappy to learn that the FBI was leading the questioning. He ordered a CIA counterterrorism team to take over in Thailand. "We were removed," Soufan said. "Harsh techniques were introduced" - at first, stripping the prisoner of his clothes and depriving him of sleep for forty-eight hours at a time - and "Abu Zubaydah shut down and stopped talking." Then the FBI took over again. — Tim Weiner

Don't forget that Mozart worked on commission. He almost always would write something if he knew exactly who was paying for it and where it would be performed. So you can't really separate the creation of genius from the appreciation of it. — Eric Weiner

In the former Soviet republics, there are three staples of life: vodka, chocolate, and corruption. I know someone who once survived in Uzbekistan for two weeks solely on these three items. — Eric Weiner

There is a discrepancy of somebody going to an art dealer and promising what they'll make for the next three years. And I'm old fashioned that way; I think that every exhibition you make is supposed to put you in the world, that the next exhibition is spinning off of that. It's almost like a riff. And if you know what you're going to do for the next three years, why don't just do it the final point? You would think, in a progressive situation, that the final would be the best. — Lawrence Weiner

They merely acknowledge human urges, erotic and monetary, and get on with it. Canadian author Mont Redmond put it best when he wrote that, in Thailand, "Anything too big to be swept under the carpet is automatically counted as furniture." The Thais might not like the furniture, might constantly be bumping into it, but they don't deny its existence. — Eric Weiner

Conversely, the biophilia hypothesis, as Wilson calls it, also explains why we find natural settings so peaceful. It's in our genes. That's why, each year, more people visit zoos than attend all sporting events combined. — Eric Weiner

The philosopher Alan Watts, were he alive today, would nod knowingly when told of that experiment. Watts once said, "Only bad music has any meaning." Meaning necessarily entails words, symbols. They point to something other than themselves. Good music doesn't point anywhere. It just is. Likewise, only unhappiness has meaning. That's why we feel compelled to talk about it and have so many words to draw upon. Happiness doesn't require words. — Eric Weiner

I am trying to be as impartial as possible. As you can tell from the trailers for Mad Men, I am a person who believes that you should know nothing. — Matthew Weiner

My way of thinking is completely different," he says. "I have no such mountains to scale; basically, I find that living itself is a struggle, and if I'm satisfied, if I have just done that, lived well, in the evening I sigh and say, 'It was okay.' — Eric Weiner

To his enduring sorrow, Bill Clinton chose yet another pious judge to run the Bureau. — Tim Weiner

Whenever people with money have power over people with less money, you have the potential for exploitation. — Jennifer Weiner

Admitting you had a problem was the first step - everyone knew that - but admitting you had a problem also left you open to the possibility that maybe you couldn't fix it — Jennifer Weiner

Compromise is a skill, and like all skills it atrophies from lack of use. — Eric Weiner

For the past few years I have engaged in several inappropriate conversations conducted over Twitter, Facebook, e-mail and occasionally on the phone with women I have met online. — Anthony Weiner

Writing let me escape ... It let me escape the insistent tug of my family, and its ongoing misery. Sitting in front of the computer, with the screen blank and the cursor blinking, was the best escape I knew. And there was plenty to escape from. — Jennifer Weiner

bear. My armor dissolves. This is not happy India. This is the country where, as Mark Twain observed, every life is sacred, except human life. Indians may care deeply about their families and circle of friends, but they don't even notice anyone outside that circle. That's why Indian homes are spotless, while just a few feet outside the front door the trash is piled high. It's outside the circle. — Eric Weiner

People will want you to behave a certain way, to make a certain choice because it reinforces the way they see the world ... But you have to do what's right for you. — Jennifer Weiner

Once you know about a work of mine you own it. There's no way I can climb inside somebody's head and remove it. — Lawrence Weiner

So here I am. Twenty-eight years old, with thirty looming on the horizon. Drunk. Fat. Alone. Unloved. And, worst of all, a cliche, Ally McBeal and Bridget Jones put together, which was probably about how much I weighed ... — Jennifer Weiner

Read everything. Read fiction and non-fiction, read hot best sellers and the classics you never got around to in college. — Jennifer Weiner

Music is playing. We will, we will rock you. But no one will be rocked here. There will be no revolution. People are too comfortable, and comfort is the revolutionaries' worst enemy. — Eric Weiner

Under Cheney's direction, the United States moved to restore the powers of secret intelligence that had flourished for fifty-five years under J. Edgar Hoover. In public speeches, the president, the vice president, and the attorney general renewed the spirit of the Red raids. In top secret orders, they revived the techniques of surveillance that the FBI had used in the war on communism. The — Tim Weiner

I would imagine, a very large percentage of people who get something for art and they do something else, and they have some excess resources. And they trade those resources with artists whose work makes them feel good, or feel better, or question. And the artist, if they're smart, they use it to buy the most expensive thing in the world: time to make more. The more that come, the better it is for these people, their children, the people they care about, fills the society with a real constant thing. — Lawrence Weiner

Divorce isn't such a tragedy. A tragedy's staying in an unhappy marriage, teaching your children the wrong things about love. Nobody ever died of divorce. — Jennifer Weiner

A deep-cover squad tried to infiltrate the far left by posing as politically radicalized Vietnam veterans well supplied with guns and drugs. Four or five of them liked their new lives so much that they never came back. — Tim Weiner

Opinions can't be inaccurate. — Matthew Weiner

So the greatest source of happiness is other people- and what does money do? It isolates us from other people. It enables us to build walls, literal and figurative, around ourselves. We move from a teeming college dorm to an apartment to a house, and if we're really wealthy, to an estate. We think we're moving up, but really we're walling off ourselves. — Eric Weiner

I rushed through the door.
You had bitten a way for me. — Hannah Weiner

Prioritization sounds like such a simple thing, but true prioritization starts with a very difficult question to answer, especially at a company with a portfolio approach: If you could only do one thing, what would it be? And you can't rationalize the answer, and you can't attach the one thing to some other things. It's just the one thing. — Jeff Weiner

Bhutan is the land of la. The monosyllabic word serves as all-purpose affirmation, honorific, and verbal tic. Mostly, it is a softener, appended to almost everything. La means "sir" but also "ya know." I like the way it sounds and, during my weeks in Bhutan, use it myself, but always self-consciously, never finding the right rhythm. — Eric Weiner

I'm in the entertainment business, where you're only as good as your last show. — Matthew Weiner

I wanted love, the big love, the kind people wrote songs and made movies about. I wanted to be the center of some guy's universe, the only thing he could think about. I wanted to matter that way. — Jennifer Weiner

Anthony Weiner deserves to be supported and hopefully he will be mayor of New York one day. I'm serious. He is a Democrat [who] actually fights for the things liberals and progressive and rational people care about. I don't know why he's being thrown under the bus. He hasn't done any - he hasn't broke any laws, — Janeane Garofalo

Somehow I couldn't stop. I had turned into someone that I would have pitied in another life; someone who searched for signs, who analyzed patterns, who went over every word in a conversation looking for hidden meanings, secret signals, the subtext that said, Yes, I still love you, of course I still love you. — Jennifer Weiner

Success has a lot of things that go along with it and I haven't experienced any personal resentment. I can't control any of that and I try not to worry about it. I hope that's not the case, you know. Most of the writers that I know and artists that I know understand what was going on. I think there's just as many things going on in the awards process that have to do with the show having won a few times. — Matthew Weiner

Money matters but less than we think and not in the way that we think. Family is important. So are friends. Envy is toxic. So is excessive thinking. Beaches are optional. Trust is not. Neither is gratitude. — Eric Weiner

A confused mind is one that is open to the possibility of change. — Eric Weiner

if everyone is a genius, then nobody is. I — Eric Weiner

She and her friends would talk about their husbands like they were children, or pets - some strange species responsible for bad smells and strange noises and messes they'd have to clean up. — Jennifer Weiner

Ask yourself if you are happy and you cease to be so." That was John Stuart Mill, the nineteenth-century British philosopher who believed that happiness should be approached sideways, "like a crab." Is Bhutan a nation of crabs? Or is this whole notion of Gross National Happiness just a clever marketing ploy, like the one Aruba dreamed up a few years ago. "Come to Aruba: the island where happiness lives. — Eric Weiner

My chest. All I'd wanted was for someone to be happy for me - happy with me, straight-up happy, not happy with questions, or happy with reservations, or happy but confused, or not happy at all ... and there was no one in my life, including my husband, who fit the bill. — Jennifer Weiner

Einstein's secretary once said that if Einstein were born among the polar bears, he would still be Einstein. But unless polar bears were well versed in theoretical physics, that is not true. Einstein would not be Einstein. Which is not to take anything away from Einstein, or the polar bears, but simply to point out that he was part of a creative ecology, and trying to isolate him from it is not only silly but futile. — Eric Weiner

I've always been a big believer in the power of place. I believe that where we are affects who we are when it comes to happiness, spirituality, economics and creative genius. — Eric Weiner

They wouldn't have believed me, and if they had they would have wanted me to explain.
And I had no explanation, no answers. When you're on a battleground, you don't have the
luxury of time to dwell on the various historical factors and sociopolitical influences that caused the war.
You just keep your head down and try to survive it, to shove the pages back in the book, close
the covers and pretend that nothing's broken, nothing's wrong. — Jennifer Weiner

Back then, I didn't understand that what was happening in my house was not happening in everyone's house at night, when the doors were shut and the blinds were drawn. It took me just as long to sort out my physical self - how to dress in a way that flattered my shape, how to do my hair and makeup (or pay professionals to do it), how to be in a body, in the world. It took time before I could take all that pain and use it; transform all that loneliness and isolation and shame into stories. — Jennifer Weiner

So street-level FBI agents turned secrets into information, and senior FBI leaders brought that information to reporters, to prosecutors, to federal grand juries, and into the public realm. That was the beginning of the end of Richard Nixon's presidency. Without the FBI, the reporters would have been lost. — Tim Weiner

The difference between people who believe they have books inside of them and those who actually write books is sheer cussed persistence - the ability to make yourself work at your craft, every day - the belief, even in the face of obstacles, that you've got something worth saying. — Jennifer Weiner

To know your organism, you must eat it.' Not just the flies: the pupae. And not just to horrify people, but to know. — Jonathan Weiner

Then, madam, they do nothing." Albert Einstein once said, "No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it." Economics is long overdue for the kind of radical shift in thinking that Einstein brought to his field of physics. Does Gross National Happiness represent such a breakthrough? — Eric Weiner

Weiner, T.: Legacy of Ashes (The history of CIA). — Anonymous

Sometimes the point isn't to end up with something worth showing the world. Sometimes it's just rehearsal. — Jennifer Weiner

You've got to make time. It's important. You know how they tell you on planes, in case of an emergency, the adults should put their oxygen masks on first? You're not going to be any good to anyone if you're not taking care of yourself. — Jennifer Weiner

LinkedIn is increasingly becoming a very strong place for companies to develop their talent plans, their recruitment plans, and so there are ways in which we can track some of the momentum there. — Jeff Weiner

The thing about bad decisions is that they don't feel like bad decisions when you're making them. They feel like the obvious choice, the of-course-that-makes-sense move. They feel, somehow, inevitable. — Jennifer Weiner

Also, the advice we were given as children when confronted with failure, "forget it and move on," is dead wrong. "Remember it and move on" is the way of the genius. I — Eric Weiner

Thinking that the world was like an orange, that I could split it open with my thumbnail and find a whole different world, the grown-up world, the secrets beneath the skin. — Jennifer Weiner

good life, the happy life, is connecting to something larger than ourselves, recognizing that we are not mere blips on the cosmic radar screen but part of something much bigger. For some, a Victorian building, with its creaking staircases and tarnished molding, provides this connection. For others, it's giving a new cellphone, gift wrapped, to Uncle Wen who died twenty years ago but is still part of the family. — Eric Weiner

I'm keeping everything on a human level, but essentially everything in our lives has to be on a human level. Any specification of something by art history doesn't make any sense. The point is, if you have a loving, adorable, supportive mother anywhere in the world and you tell her all of your dreams, all of your aspirations, and the reward you would like, and she understands you, then it's not worth doing. — Lawrence Weiner

husband, Dave, my daughter, and I had moved out of Cen- ter City and into a house in Haverford that I refused to call a McMansion, even though that's exactly what it was, but I loved Ellie's pediatrician so much that 1'd never even tried to find a suburban replacement. — Jennifer Weiner

These days, young people watch TV on smartphones and computers. Young people with an actual TV set are harder to find than a picture of Anthony Weiner with his clothes on. — Craig Ferguson

He had sacrificed so much
And now? What if not even all that was enough to quiet that voice ... the voice that said, 'You're not worthy, you don't deserve it, nothing you do will ever be enough. — Jennifer Weiner

Having multiple identities (though not multiple personalities) is, he believes, conducive to happiness. This runs counter to the prevailing belief in the United States and other western nations, where specialization is considered the highest good. Academics, doctors, and other professionals spend lifetimes learning more and more about less and less. In Iceland, people learn more and more about more and more. I — Eric Weiner

The name itself is trouble. "Slough" means, literally, muddy field. A snake sloughs, or sheds, its dead skin. John Bunyan wrote of the "slough of despond" in Pilgrim's Progress. In the 1930s, John Betjeman wrote this poem about Slough: Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough! It isn't fit for humans now, There isn't grass to graze a cow, Swarm over, Death! Then he got nasty. To this day, the residents of Slough rankle when anyone mentions the poem. The town's reputation as a showpiece of quiet desperation was cemented when the producers of the TV series The Office decided to set the show in Slough. — Eric Weiner

Fitzgerald and the FBI agents who worked with him in New York all knew that Ali Mohamed was working for al-Qaeda. They decided to arrest him then and there. Two years later, he pleaded guilty in open court to serving as bin Laden's first deep-penetration agent in America and a key conspirator in the embassy bombings. Then the United States made him vanish; no record of his imprisonment exists. He was an embarrassment to the FBI. — Tim Weiner

is the root cause of sorrow but desire is also the root cause of action. How do we counter the paralysis of action when there is no desire to motivate us? — Eric Weiner

Emma has just returned from a visit to her factory. On the floor, she has spread piles of bags. They are everywhere, and they are beautiful. I'm tempted to get naked and roll around in the pile but restrain myself. This is a forgiving place, but even the inhabitants of 1 Shanti Road have their limits. — Eric Weiner

Artists try to ask questions, and within our society, unless there are artists, those questions don't get asked. And everybody blames the market. — Lawrence Weiner