A Quote by Bill Bryson
It's hard not to be kind of pessimistic about human beings generally, because we do tend to mess things up. If you just look at the history of extinctions, we've killed off an awful lot of animals - and I don't think we're doing a very good job of looking after the planet.
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I think I look pretty good. And I know there are human beings my age who look the way I do. There must be stories about us - not just about people who are young and good-looking.
When movies tend to start to preach to me, I tend to shut them off, whether I agree with the message or not. I don't think the job of art is to preach, I think it's to ask questions and make people aware of differences and different ways of looking at things. That's what I want to do, anyway. Whether I'm successful or not, that's up to history.
Music is what is going to save me," "On the bad days, when I have to look at the cold, hard facts of life, I see that this is not the music business I came up in and I have to be very, very objective and detached and say, 'what's good about it and what's bad about it?' Mostly, I'm finding it good that it's not the same old music business, because the music business I came up in really didn't advance anything I was doing, and I don't think it was particularly kind to a lot of artists.
I've seen people that don't treat their animals well and yet their animals are still just as loving to them even though they're not treated that well. It's very hard to find that kind of loyalty and love and affection in human beings.
I think people in Europe are generally pessimistic about the future. They have low expectations; they're not working hard to change things. When you're a slacker with a pessimistic view of the future, you're likely to meet those expectations.
There are novels that end well, but in between there are human beings acting like human beings. And human beings are not perfect. All of the motives a human being may have, which are mixed, that's the novelists' materials. That's where they have to go. And a lot of that just isn't pretty. We like to think of ourselves as really, really good people. But look in the mirror. Really look. Look at your own mixed motives. And then multiply that.
I'm very good at having time off. I tend to take whole years off - I had 1994 and 1997 off. I find it very easy; I just love pottering around doing normal things.
It's concerning to me when people look at the course of education as just a means for getting a job four years later. If you're just doing this because it is going to lead to a 'good job,' you're better off doing something you're genuinely interested in.
I think of myself as quite a confused kind of person, because I think there's so many great things about the world, but there are so many awful things too. I feel very guilty a lot of the time about enjoying my life so much when there are people living in such misery.
With respect to phenomena like mass extinction, somebody might say why worry about it because in a geological perspective mass extinctions aren't so bad, they wipe out some things and then 10 million years down the road we get new and interesting objects.But I tell you mass extinctions are really awful for folks caught in the midst of them.
I'm very pessimistic about adaptations from one medium to another. I've got a very kind of primitive, Puritan view of it. I tend to think that if something was derived for one medium, then there's no real immediate reason to think that it's necessarily going to be as good or better if adapted into another one. There have been very good stage plays that have made some very good films. But there are not so many differences between the theater and the cinema as there are between the cinema and, say, reading a book or reading a comic.
It's very hard to get people, because it's just one of those things. I mean, everybody is working. And then during the off- season, it's easy, but we don't have the people during the off-season, because the club closes during off-season, so lot of people don't want a part-time job.
I feel very strongly that history is about everything. It isn't just about politics or the military or social issues. If art, music, engineering, science, medicine, finance, the world of architecture and technology - if those are left out, then you're not getting a full sense of the human condition. History is human and we human beings are involved in all kinds of things and that's part of our humanity.
As pessimistic as I am about the nature of human beings and our capacity for atrocity and malevolence and betrayal and laziness and inertia, and all those things, I think we can transcend all that and set things straight.
As soon as you start to think of that thing that you want to convey or say, you can always just say it much better than you can actually rhyme it or stuff it into a song. It's very, very difficult to just kind of get your point across without going the back way. And you have to be good at that, to not think about things so hard. Let the pen take over, so that it's somebody else's job to dissect the lyrics and tell you what you're all about.
The consumption of animals - whether you're wearing them or eating them - is extraordinarily damaging to the planet. There are over a billion animals killed a year for food, half of which don't even get eaten. And there's over 50 million animals killed just for fashion.
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