Quotes about "Retirement & Later Life"

The people I really admire, like William Blake and John Coltrane and Richard Wagner, had these ridiculously full universes that took their entire lives to describe. ”

When it comes to music, I am a dictator. Making a Dirty Projectors record come to life is like making a movie; I'm the one that makes the picture, and then we all figure out how to realise it. ”

Just like any songwriter, the songs come out of where I am in my life and what I'm doing and who I'm hanging out with and the kind of sounds I'm imagining. I always loved the idea of it evolving in the same way that life changes. ”

Music has been there for me. Whether good or bad, it's the way that I process experience. As a listener and as a writer. ”

Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way round. ”

Magic has been around forever, and it's also been in trouble forever. I'm not suggesting that there was ever a time when the practice of magic was celebrated by those in power. Actually, such practices were routinely demonized by monarchs and organized religions precisely because magic is inherently democratic. ”

Class is something I know about. I've lived it every day of my life, and it shaped me in my identity. ”

One of my best friends is named David Leventhal, and it has always been a constant source of amusement to see how the similarity and differences play out in our lives. ”

I felt in my bones that Alfred Kazin was right to suggest that 'the deepest side of being American is the sense of being like nothing before us in history' - a historical conceit that privileged biography as the narrative of the exceptionalist experience. ”

I have always been averse to theorizing about the art or craft of biography. Like Disraeli's biographer, Lord Blake, who offers the cautionary analogy of the biographical centipede unsure of her next step because of too much cerebration, I have made it my practice to let the facts find the theory. ”