Ed Lee Quotes

I just did one movie and there was no career for me, anyway.

If your product is great, you yourself do not have to be a great seller.

They're on you day and night. Their oversight is just too extreme [. . .] That's why our 10-year loan, we paid it back in three years. We couldn't stand the government. The bureaucracy kills you.

In the great undertakings, there is glory, even in failure.

Incompetency begets incompetency. The last thing a guy who isn't sure of himself wants is a guy backing him up who is sure of himself.

Get all the education you can then go out and do something - do anything.

I was good friends with Frank Sinatra, I heard Steve Kaufman painting his portrait, so I asked Steve to paint my portrait.

You, my friend, alone are equal to a hundred of such friends. Happy Birthday to you.

I don't need a $100 million mistake. Try to make a $5 million mistake if you have to make one.

When future historians look back on our way of curing inflation...they'll probably compare it to bloodletting in the Middle Ages.

In the old days, if a neighbors apples fell into your yard, you worked it out over the back fence or picked them up and made pies. Today, you sue.

I've got to get stop getting fired like this. People will start to think I'm a drifter.

Here's what we should be doing. We've got to get off fossil fuels.

I'm sometimes described as a flamboyant leader and a hip-shooter, a fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants operator. But if that were true, I could never have been successful in this business.

They've got about as many lawyers as we have sumo-wrestlers.

In a corporation, there can only be one guy in the end: the CEO.

You can't have a country or a city or a state that's worth a damn unluss you govern within yourself in your day-to-day life.

Every little kid wants to grow up to be a cowboy, and I did.

Your retirement identity is of a successful person who creatively and efficiently manages your money and lifestyle to adapt to the ever changing economic and personal conditions of our time.

I know too well how you can go from feeling like your sister knows you better than anyone else in the world, to feeling jealous of her, to wanting to strangle her ha-ha.

I think if you have the compulsion to write, you're not going to feel whole until you start putting words on paper.

Genre categorization is a capitalist (rather than artistic) thing, a symptom of marketing and major-chain bookshelf placement.

Having a voice unlike another means you've "found yourself" as a writer.

I don't have a philosophy. I have an instinct. I accept stuff that I like.

The Internet is perfect for delivering large blocks of text to people throughout the world for free. That's a plus. The downside is the ADD, the Internet-addled Attention Deficit Disorder.

The Web ultimately is a medium used by real offline people, and as such, it'll probably be whatever we are.

There's a ton of good art and music and writing out there offline among a ton of trash, and the same goes with what's online.

If you want to change things in the USA it's best not to spend all your time writing but to take action against the ol' sea of troubles.

Online writing is supplementary, complementary, another part of the whole, something that's only as important as one's investment in it.

I'm an only child and an American and am wholly in favor of uniqueness of voice in everything, especially music and writing.

The problem with the term "The New Fiction" is that the fiction will inevitably be old. The same could have been said about the work of any generation of writers.

America's all about the various voices, right? When we all speak with a common voice we verge on fascism, which is militaristic, and fundamentally anti-American.

Sound is the first thing that we tune into.

Many people do think it's naive to improvise in front of paying customers. I'm not saying one way is better than another.

It's very demanding to make up your own music.

Names and theoretical things don't occur to me. If they do, I'm not doing my real playing mode.

We all learn from each other, and I never really hung out with guys in that way, so I missed out.

Out of Coltrane's whole history, there are things which I think are great from all the periods.

Labels don't mean anything to me. I'm trying to play as passionately as I'm able to. If they want to call that cool, that's fine. Just spell the name right, is the formula.

I listen to classical music very much. There's a lot of jazz that I don't enjoy listening to.

You take a poll of any people. What is it they want? The right to write an editorial as you like? They want homes, medicine, jobs, schools.

I’m not intellectually convinced that one-man, one-vote is the best. We practise it because that’s what the British bequeathed us

I wish I can meet my wife in the hereafter, but I don't think I will. I just cease to exist just as she has ceased to exist.

That was the year the British decided to get out and sell everything. So I immediately held an election. I knew the people will be dead scared. And I won my bet big-time. The gullible fools!

One of the most liberating personal discoveries I have made is the knowledge that whenever I am upset, there is another way of looking at any situation, person, or condition.

What if happiness is in fact more about remembering who we are, rather than attempting to change anything or anyone at all?

Forgiveness is essential to health, growth, and healing.

I trust that no loving thought goes unnoticed, even when I do not see immediate gratitude or behavior changes in the other person.

Many people live in a self-imposed prison and don't even know it.

The paradox of acceptance: When our mind becomes less attached and dependent on things being a certain way our happiness in life dramatically improves.