A Quote by Owen Pallett

I feel as if dystopian and utopian representations are historically the most effective way of criticizing modern society. You know, because you don't have to be factually accurate. You can kind of construct some awesome strawman arguments in your fictional world.
I mean, it was a rough place ["Wild Bill Hickok"], and you had to wear this kind of cloak that you were a badass, and the most efficient way to do that was with your language. Swearing was just a part of how you got by during the day, and it was quite historically accurate, that depiction.
As one of the leaders in the world for AI, I feel tremendous excitement and responsibility to create the most awesome and benevolent technology for society and to educate the most awesome and benevolent technologists - that's my calling.
The way superheroes dominate the fictional landscape now, along with dystopian futures and zombies. Yeah, definitely - I think these stories function as a kind of mythology for us.
I guess Surrealism has a draw for me because it's an unknown world. It's a world of subconscious. Some things you can't really get your hands on very easily. Things that are kind of nebulous and they feel like they're not completely formed. You have to feel your way through that.
In some places, there's the concept of one religion, one truth. In the Muslim world, there's the notion of Allah. The Western, multireligious modern society is some kind of a challenge to this. These, I feel, are the main causes [for terrorism], and, when combined with lots of anger and frustration, cause a huge amount of hate.
We cannot create blueprint for future society, but it is good to think about that. It is good to have in mind a goal. It is constructive, it is helpful, it is healthy, to think about what future society might be like, because then it guides you somewhat what you are doing today, but only so long as this discussions about future society don't become obstacles to working towards this future society. Otherwise you can spend discussing this utopian possibility versus that utopian possibility, and in the mean time you are not acting in a way that would bring you closer to that.
Reducing everything immediately to good and evil is bad history - not only because it isn't true, but because reductionism is unpersuasive; it is boring. Good history, on the other hand, demands that one talk socratically - that one can present alternate viewpoints, not strawman arguments.
Obviously, the opinions that are most accurate are the ones that are closest to you - your crew, your friends, your family. Those people know who you are, and that's accurate.
When criticism comes your way as an actor they are not criticizing your writing or your painting or your piece, they are criticizing you! It is hard to put that away in a place where you are not hurt.
Orwell had a very accurate foresight of today's dystopian world we live in. If only he was around to see it.
Most dystopian, classic and contemporary, paints a future world that puts a twist on present society - a future world that could plausibly happen.
Do you believe you can know yourselves if you don't somehow con- struct yourselves? Or that I can know you if I don't construct you in my way? And can you know me if I don't construct you in my way? We can know only what we succeed in giving form to.
I actually dislike, more than many people, working through literary allusion. I just feel that there's something a bit snobbish or elitist about that. I don't like it as a reader, when I'm reading something. It's not just the elitism of it; it jolts me out of the mode in which I'm reading. I've immersed myself in the world and then when the light goes on I'm supposed to be making some kind of literary comparison to another text. I find I'm pulled out of my kind of fictional world, I'm asked to use my brain in a different kind of way. I don't like that.
The kind of dystopian books that I've always loved the most are the ones where you find yourself in a world that's less scorched-earth and instead a world that has just been made different.
What's fascinating to me is the way that multiple stories go into creating any world - a fictional world, but certainly the world that we live in as well. Of course, I cannot control that world. I can just control the fictional world.
You can assert a fifth amendment privilege and not testify. But if you go in and swear to tell the truth, then you better do it. Otherwise, if a prosecutor finds that you have testified in a way that is factually incorrect and you had reason to know that it was factually incorrect, then you're guilty of perjury.
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