Quotes About Events

I am always anxious to know what has happened while I've been asleep.

Everybody knows what's going on. Even if they don't watch it they know what's happening.

Things happening around the world are affecting you and me.

As long as there are headlines I'll have material.

Well, it has been rather hectic since the 11th of September. And even before then it was quite busy.

I don't blame it on the Hell's Angels. I blame it on the people who were there.

I guess I have an aversion to writing about big events and heroic actions. The everyday has always seemed most important to me in writing, probably because I believe people reveal themselves in how they deal with small details.

In my experience there is no such thing as luck, my young friend—only highly favorable adjustments of multiple factors to incline events in one's favor.

A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened.

They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening.

A writer inevitably - and less directly this applies to all the arts - about contemporary events, and his impulse is to tell what he believes to be truth. But no government, no big organisation, will pay for the truth.

The controversy over freedom of speech and of the press is at bottom a controversy of the desirability, or otherwise, of telling lies. What is really at issue is the right to report contemporary events truthfully, or as truthfully as is consistent with the ignorance, bias and self-deception from which every observer necessarily suffers.

Beware of my partisanship, my mistakes of fact and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events.

In case I have not said this somewhere earlier in the book I will say it now: beware of my partisanship, my mistakes of fact and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events. And beware of exactly the same things when you read any other book on this period of the Spanish war.

That is invariably the case in the East; a story always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of events the vaguer it becomes.

Tout concourt à I'histoire, tout est I'histoire, meme les romans qui semblent ne se rattacher en rien aux situations politiques qui les voient eclore.

that's really all a story is: a series of things that happen in sequence, in which we can discern a pattern of causality.

causation is what creates the appearance of meaning. "The queen died, and then the king died" (E. M. Forster's famous formulation) describes two unrelated events occurring in sequence. It doesn't mean anything. "The queen died, and the king died of grief " puts those events into relation; we understand that one caused the other.

How good are markets in predicting real-world developments? Reading the record, it is striking how many calamities that I anticipated did not in fact materialise. Financial markets constantly anticipate events, both on the positive and on the negative side, which fail to materialise exactly because they have been anticipated. It is an old joke that the stock market has predicted seven of the last two recessions. Markets are often wrong.

During this period, so many important events have occurred, and such changes in men and things have taken place, as the compass of a letter would give you but an inadequate idea of. None of which events, however, nor all of them together, have been able to eradicate from my mind, the recollection of those happy moments—the happiest of my life—which I have enjoyed in your company.

In any case the mind of the Third Estate is of capital interest in showing the historian that events have their immediate roots not in their antecedents but in the men who intervene by interpreting those events.

It was a strange winter and nothing and everything happened.

When I worked in Los Angeles covering hard news, very often when something important would happen I'd be off in the woods covering something unimportant, which was more interesting to me.

None of the editors I've worked with have ever asked me to pull my punches. They've never asked me to give them anything other than my own interpretation of events.