Quotes About Influence

Writers change the world one heart, one mind, at a time. That should be enough to keep us going.

Readers often become fans of a genre after discovering one defining work in that genre.

Your personal tastes are going to be influenced by the stories that you've loved the most. So don't ever try to be "completely" original. It's a good way to go mad.

The thing about people who are truly and malignantly crazy: their real genius is for making the people around them think they themselves are crazy. In military science this is called Psy-Ops, for your info.

Real leaders are people who "help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.

In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.

It is a fact of life that certain people are corrosive to others' self esteem simply as a function of who and what they are.

There is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.

Can you choose something when you are forcefully and enthusiastically immersed in it at an age when the resources and information necessary for choosing are not yet yours?

Describe-the-sort-of-man-you-find-attractive-and-I'll-affect-the-demeanor-of-that-sort-of-man

The reasons that center on others are easy to manipulate. All hollow things are light.

Believe what you want. I'm powerless over what you believe.

But someone sometime let you forget how to choose, and what. Someone let your peoples forget it was the only thing of importance, choosing. . . How to choose any but a child's greedy choices if there is no loving-filled father to guide, inform, teach the person how to choose? How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?

shall I spend much of your time pointing out the degree to which televisual values influence the contemporary mood of jaded weltschmerz, self-mocking materialism, blank indifference, and the delusion that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive?

Our leaders, our government is us, all of us, so if they're venal and weak it's because we are.

Advertising that makes fun of itself is so powerful because it implicitly congratulates both itself and the viewer (for making the joke and getting the joke, respectively).

She almost reminds the engineer of certain types in high school whom everyone adored because you sensed it made no difference to them whether you adored them.

The thing about people who are truly and malignantly crazy: their real genius is for making the people around them think they themselves are crazy.

A real leader can somehow get us to do certain things that deep down we think are good and want to be able to do but usually can't get ourselves to do on our own.

It's no coincidence it's the gurus on mountains who're wise. You get to the top: you're already theirs.

you are excused from doing the work of constructing the fantasy. The ads do it for you. The ads, therefore, don't flatter your adult agency, or even ignore it—they supplant it.

Look for a candidate who can do to the electorate what corporations are learning to do, so Government—or, better, Big Government, Big Brother, Intrusive Government—becomes the image against which this candidate defines himself. Though

It is a fact of life that certain people are corrosive to others' self esteem simply as a function of who and what they are. The

My father's mood surrounded him like a field and affected any room he occupied, like an odor or a certain cast to the light.