Quotes About Influence

The band readily acknowledged that they borrowed ideas rather than making up their own. "That's all you can do today," Turner explained. "I think you're kinda fooling yourself as a rock band if you think you're doing something really original.

Music can bind people in weird ways—socially, information—a lot of people get everything they know from songs and groups.

Relationships are currency, something Sonic Youth had picked up on not only from the art world but from the camaraderie of the SST bands.

The whole point is if you deal with yourself and people you can exert influence upon," said Preslar, "then maybe you can put those people in a mentality that will be beneficial to everybody else later on.

His pervasive belief in the power of words, instilled by his legal studies, reminded me of the ancient Aramaic incantation "Abracadabra," meaning "I speak therefore I create.

This was the writer's true doppelgänger, I thought; not some invisible imp of the perverse who watched you from the shadows, periodically appearing, dressed in your clothes and carrying your house keys, to set fire to your life; but rather the typical protagonist of your work -- Roderick Usher, Eric Waldensee, Francis Macomber, Dick Diver -- whose narratives at first reflected but in time came to determine your life's very course.

I like the way she dances. She shows a heavy Pharaonic influence, I'd say, in the elbows. With perhaps just a soupçon of Snoopy in the feet.

He was tired of shouldering the weight of other people's bad decisions along with his own.

everything, in fact, recalled him to me, as though he'd left the whole world to me in his will.

The Filipino-style Chinese donut, or shtekeleh, is the great contribution of the District of Sitka to the food lovers of the world. In its present form, it cannot be found in the Philippines. No Chinese trenchermen would recognize it as the fruit of his native fry kettles. Like the storm god Yahweh of Sumeria, the shtekeleh was not invented by the Jews, but the world would sport neither the God not the shtekeleh without Jews and their desires.

People notice only what you tell them to notice," he said. "And then only if you remind them.

I love movies. Movies have influenced me as a writer.

where there's government subsidy, there is always corruption.

the most likely place that elected politicians ran afoul of the law was in the area of money.

Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.

But time has a way of changing things. It's a circle. It takes power away and gives it to those who once had none. Right now your father is the one who is destroyed.

Lastly, special thanks to Raymond Chandler for inspiring the title of the book. Describing in 1950 the time and place from which he drew his early crime stories, Chandler wrote, "The streets were dark with something more than night." Sometimes they still are.

If you're not cop, you're little people.

Frank Morgan, George Cables, Art Pepper, Ron Carter, and Thelonious Monk.

In a courtroom I can sell ice to Eskimos

the Democrat. What was worse, for her, at least, was that the mayor was a supporter of

Science is as corruptible a human activity as any other.

Power is neither male or female.

Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there's a McDonald's on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas.