J. L. B. Smith Quotes

World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: 'How can I do it?'

In our family, there wasn't anything else besides art. Nothing else in the world existed. My father never spoke about going to a movie or listening to music, other than my mother's singing.

Why do people always assume that volume will succeed when logic won't?

It's just disgusting that in this society, the majority of students in art school are women, but they amount to less than 30% of what is shown in museums. That has not changed radically.

I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.

I read Carver. Julio Cortázar. Amis's essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn't sound like me.

What I want to accomplish artistically amounts to nothing more than fulfilling the promise of the American Revolution.

Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.

If you do not prepare yourself physically to succeed, you must prepare yourself mentally for the humiliation of failure.

You can feel bad... I mean, that's not illegal.

Mental stamina - determination - is a quality of the mind shattered by fatigue.But physical stamina - endurance - is built upon fatigue.

Suffering Third World children have nutritional deficiencies not vaccine deficiencies.

To believe in something not yet proved and to underwrite it with our lives: It is the only way we can leave the future open.

Your life is your art.

The only measures that count are progress over your own self, and triumph over the vacant abstractions that most people mistake for thinking.

Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.

Your ChoicES TodaY DeterMinE Your TomorroW And You Make YouR LifE ThrougH The PoweR OF Choice

Oh, I know that. You know me, baby, I cannot be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half.

Where the soul is full of peace and joy, outward surrounding and circumstances are of comparatively little account.

If I play Coachella, it's sponsored by a company - that's corporate, too. But we're playing it because we're getting paid and we want to be a part of the festival.

I'm like part of the Kurt Cobain school of writing lyrics, which is the syntax of the words is more important than... is where it all comes from.

In 29 years, I had recorded over 2,200 songs. I was amazed.

I vowed that whenever my family needed me, I would give up everything to go to them, no matter what. The show must go on was meaningless to me.

Teenagers are like cats - they have important business that doesn't involve mere humans.

You can't make yourself feel positive, but you can choose how to act, and if you choose right, it builds your confidence

I mean, time for me, I can make it go slow or fast, however I please. That's how I know it doesn't exist.

New tech almost always looks dumb right before it completely changes your life.

You cannot be both fashionable and first-rate

In better times the religion of the tribe or state has nothing in common with the private and foreign superstitions or magical rites that savage terror may dictate to the individual.

The old know what they want; the young are sad and bewildered.

Everyone wants to be perceived a certain way, to gain the things that they have decided are the things that they want in their life.

An idea is a curious thing. It will not work unless you do.

The lusts and greeds of the body scandalize the Soul; but it has to come to heel.

I don't design clothes for the Queen, but for the people who wave at her as she goes by.

Of all hateful occupations, housekeeping is to my mind the most hateful.

All our lives we are putting pennies — our most golden pennies — into penny-in-the-slot machines that are almost always empty.

Growing old is not a gradual decline, but a series of drops, full of sorrow, from one ledge to another below it.

It is the peculiar beauty of this method, gentlemen, and one which endears it to the really scientific mind, that under no circumstance can it be of the smallest possible utility.

A question may be asked, 'Will mothers have their children in eternity?' Yes! Yes! Mothers, you shall have your children.

I like to look good, but I like my body to function well more than anything. For me, it's as spiritual and intellectual as it is physical. And emotional. I enjoy pushing myself.

Love is one of the chief characteristics of Deity, and ought to be manifested by those who aspire to be the sons of God.

When you find things that are tried and true for millennia, you can bet that it's going to happen tomorrow.

I like my time on earth. And no matter what kind of cards I've been dealt, I'm happy to be there.

Americans just don't know what being a movie star's all about.

Good press, bad press, whatever, only means a lot to me if it's writ by somebody I respect, by somebody I like.

I didn't begin my life in 1975 with 'Horses.' I recorded 'Horses' in 1975, but was drawing in Paris in 1969.

The film [Dream of Life] doesn't hide anything, except maybe moments of sorrow or darkness that belonged to me.

First of all, let's get one thing straight: fitness and exercise aren't the same thing. You can exercise without getting fit, but you can't get fit without exercise.

Creativity inspires me.

I think it's important for people to realize that we were all young, all naive, and also we had lived in a time that had magic.