Quotes About Influence

Things—even people—have a way of leaking into each other," I explain, "like flavors when you cook.

Rage made you the creature of those who enraged you, it gave them to much power. Rage killed the mind...

If power was a a cry, then human lives were lived in the echo of the cries of others.

what a leveller this remote-control gizmo was...it chopped down the heavyweight and stretched out the slight until all the set's emissions, commercials, murders, game-shows, the thousand and one varying joys and terrors of the real and the imagined, acquired an equal weight...

In spite of all my efforts to create a neat, tidy, obedient, moderate, unexceptional persona, I was simply too weird for them; until that is, my first female tutor was hired.

the act of falling in love with a book or story changes us in some way, and the beloved tale becomes a part of our picture of the world, a part of the way in which we understand things and make judgments and choices in our daily lives.

If you live in the twentieth century you do not find it hard to see yourself in those, more desperate than yourself, who seek to shape it to their will.

A poet's work,' he answers. 'To name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.

It's as if we're standing still and the world is traveling past us. Or maybe the world is TV and I don't know who's in charge of the zapper.

We are other than what we would have been if we had crossed the oceans, if or mothers and fathers had not crossed the skies in search of work and dignity and a better life for their children. We have been made again: but I say that we shall also be the ones to remake this society, to shape it from the bottom to the top.

The book has gone out into the world and the world has remade it.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad? No, that wasn't it at all. Well, they did do that, perhaps, but they also allowed you to become the person, and the writer, that you had it in you to be.

say: maybe not in these words; maybe not in words at all, but in the purer language of thought; but yes, certainly, this is what was at the bottom of it all; because children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison, and it was the poison of grown-ups which did for us.

I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each "I," every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world.

Women have made me; and also unmade. From Reverend Mother to the Widow, and even beyond, I have been at the mercy of the so-called (erroneously, in my opinion!) gentler sex.

Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come.

What sort of god could be excused the actions of his followers? Didn't it, in a way, infantilise the deity to say he was powerless against the faithful?

Things – even people – have a way of leaking into each other,' I explain, 'like flavours when you cook. Ilse Lubin's suicide, for example, leaked into old Aadam and sat there in a puddle until he saw God.

Do not make the mistake, it said, speaking perfect English, of equating size with power. Or you might find a cricket squashing you under its thumb.

It is a true desire of every artist to impose his or her vision on the world

When the sword of the tongue is drawn, the emperor thought, it inflicts deeper cuts than the sharpest blade.

History is a consequence not only of people's actions, but also of their forgetfulness.

Here's a great lie, thinks the Grandee of Jahilia drifting into sleep: the pen is mightier than the sword.

She made only one educational stipulation: religious instruction. Unlike Aziz, who was racked by ambiguity, she had remained devout. 'You have your Hummingbird,' she told him, 'but I, whatsitsname, have the Call of God. A better noise, whatsitsname, than that man's hum.' It was one of her rare political comments… and then the day arrived when Aziz threw out the religious tutor.