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“Command is a mountaintop. The air breathed there is different, and the perspectives seen there are different, from those of the valley of obedience. The passion for order and the genius for construction, which are part of man's natural endowment, get full play there. The man who has grown great sees from the top of his tower what he can make, if he so wills, of the swarming masses below him.”
Source : Bertrand de Jouvenel (1949). “On Power: Its Nature and the History of Its Growth”
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“There's always going to be one more thing. Because that's what infinite feels like. And the difference between love and everything else is that it's infinite, it's built out of something infinite, or it feels like it is, anyway, which is the same thing to us. You think a million billion more things will come your way, a million billion more versions of everything. But no, everything that actually causes that infinite feeling, the circumstances of every infinite feeling, is so, so finite.”
Source : B.J. Novak (2014). “One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories”, p.78, Vintage
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“When you're around people, act like you like them.”
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“We live in a time of renaissance ... cities are coming back to life, after a long neglect.”
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“Mom raised us to believe that every lie puts something out there in the world that's inevitably going to come back and bite you in the petunia.”
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“There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.”
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“Nobody in the Senate on a bipartisan fashion trusts the Iranians. They lie. They cheat. They're a murderous regime. They've been trying to develop a nuclear weapon.”
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“As for the influence on my writing,music has definitely influenced how I write. That idea of cadence, repetition, all those elements appear throughout my writing. Drumming has definitely had a huge influence on the way I write, too. Has definitely tuned my ear to rhythm. After I've written something, I'll go through it repeatedly, carefully listening to the construction of the words, seeing, hearing how they flow.”
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“For me, making a photograph is mostly an intellectual process of understanding people or cities and their historical and phenomenological connections. At that point the photo is almost made, and all that remains is the mechanical process.”
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“Think about the stories you have inside that scare you. That's what you should be writing. I and others call that writing from the dark place. Our humiliations and secret fears and deepest anxieties, those times where we were at our worst: that's the best material.”
