Quotes About Time

There'd never been a more advantageous time to be a criminal in America than during the 13 years of Prohibition. At a stroke, the American government closed down the fifth largest industry in the United States - alcohol production - and just handed it to criminals - a pretty remarkable thing to do.

The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years.

I waited and worked, and watched the inferior exalted for nearly thirty years; and when recognition came at last, it was too late to alter events, or to make a difference in living.

'Ralph's Party' was a romantic comedy, and at the end of it, the two main characters, Ralph and Jen, kiss for the first time and think they're going to be happy together. Then, 10 years later, I wrote a sequel in which they've been together for 10 years and are about to split up.

I had known Colonel Charlie Flynn since he was a lieutenant 23 years earlier, and I remembered how his first child, Molly, had been born while Charlie was deployed to the first Gulf War.

If you struggle with putting things into perspective, just ask yourself two simple questions: What's the worst thing that could happen as a result of this? Will this matter in five years? Your answers should put a stop to cataclysmic thinking.

Songs really are like a form of time travel because they really have moved forward in a bubble. Everyone who's connected with it, the studio's gone, the musicians are gone, and the only thing that's left is this recording which was only about a three-minute period maybe 70 years ago.

Some of you read with me 40 years ago a portion of Aristotle's Ethics, a selection of passages that describe his idea of happiness. You may not remember too well.

Tradition is the illusion of permanance.

It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.

Britain has had a very honourable tradition of literary sci-fi - H. G. Wells, John Wyndham, J. G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss, Michael Moorcock - but for whatever reason, they have never really been given the time of day on screen.

I think my attitudes about the past are very traditional. You can't ignore history; you can't escape it even if you want to. You might as well know where you come from, and you might as well know that everything has been done in some shape or form.

Personally I estimate about a third of my time is spent on author events, social media and traditional publicity.

Once music ceases to be ephemeral - always disappearing - and becomes instead material... it leaves the condition of traditional music and enters the condition of painting. It becomes a painting, existing as material in space, not immaterial in time.

We don't really have any big family traditions; just spending time with each other is the most important part.

You don't make any money sitting in traffic.

And it's interesting, when you look at the predictions made during the peak of the boom in the 1990s, about e-commerce, or internet traffic, or broadband adoption, or internet advertising, they were all right - they were just wrong in time.

City life is stressful. Everybody is running around like crazy, stuck in traffic jams trying to make meetings, trying to make ends meet, trying to meet deadlines, trying to get kids to and from activities. There aren't enough hours in the day for all this business.

I was late, as a player, many times. If you have bad traffic, what are you doing to do? Make a miracle? Sometimes it happens.

As a novelist, I feel lucky that I can traffic in nuance. I'm more interested in looking at how things change over time, at how people try and sometimes fail to make meaning out of their lives.

I've developed my passion for cars that drive themselves from being stuck in traffic for many, many, many hours of my life. I don't know what it adds up to, but I feel like I've lost a year or two just in traffic. That's big to me. That's a lot of time, a lot of money that I just lose on the road.

In L.A., I don't really want to go out because traffic sucks so bad. I'm sorry, I'm not going to spend five hours a day in my car, so you have to choose where you live very carefully.

I always almost miss my flight. My routine is to constantly, no matter how bad or good the traffic is, to almost miss my flight.

While being late in L.A. is common because of traffic, more than 20 minutes is too much.