A Quote by Tom Junod

I'm a suit guy. I like wearing them for the sense of completion they offer. I like buying them for the sense of near permanence - the knowledge that whatever I buy will be part of my life for the next ten years or so.
If you ask me what I think people should be getting next season, I’ll tell you what I’d like them to buy—nothing. I’d like people to stop buying and buying and buying.
Ten years dropped from a man's life are no small loss; ten years of manhood, of household happiness and care; ten years of honest labor, of conscious enjoyment of sunshine and outdoor beauty; ten years of grateful life--one day looking forward to all this; the next, waking to find them passed, and a blank.
Our business has changed so much. Do people even want albums, or do they just buy singles now? You sort of feel like you're the last guy manufacturing VCRs... but I really like albums, and so I like doing them. I'll be the last one making them, even when no one's buying them.
I'm good with songs I haven't written, if I like them. I'm glad I didn't write any of them. I already know how they go, so I have more freedom with them. I understand these songs. I've known them for 40 years, 50 years, maybe longer, and they make a lot of sense. So I'm not coming to them like a stranger.
I don't know why in this country we coddle corporate criminals, war criminals, and racists. People walk on eggshells around them, and yet they will say a word like "liberal" as if it's pejorative. Or somebody who wants unions or reproductive justice, they will treat them like there's something wrong with that person. Does that make sense? People seem to be more frightened of upsetting a war criminal or a racist and more willing to disparage a very nice guy like Dennis Kucinich. Does that make sense?
I do a lot of curiosity buying; I buy it if I like the album cover, I buy it if I like the name of the band, anything that sparks my imagination. I still like to go to record stores, I like to just wander around and I'll buy whatever catches my attention.
Fine things in wood are important, not only aesthetically, as oddities or rarities, but because we are becoming aware of the fact that much of our life is spent buying and discarding, and buying again, things that are not good. Some of us long to have at least something, somewhere, which will give us harmony and a sense of durability—I won’t say permanence, but durability—things that, through the years, become more and more beautiful, things we can leave to our children.
I sense people expect something to show for ten years. But I do feel like it is dense. Some of my own favorite books are slim, but there's a lot of weight and power in them.
Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years.
When someone disagrees with me, I do not have to immediately start revising what I just said. People don't want me to always agree with them. They can sense this is phony. They can sense I am trying to control them: I am agreeing with them to make them like me. They feel; "I don't want to exist to like you. I DON'T exist to like you."
The street is the most impactful for me really, always, and the Internet. I guess I'd like to sell some more light pieces so I can rent some more billboards; that's my only ambition in life really. Then I'd like to save up some money so I can buy a very simple wooden house, and then after that I'd like to start buying billboards. I'd like to buy a bunch of billboards in different cities so we owned them and I could give them to Occupy to tell the truth with.
This world is filled with things that will never make sense. Trying to make so much sense of them will only result in one thing: Spending the rest of your life trying to remember what you were like before any of it mattered.
I like to carry around extremely pretentious books, and I don't know if I can read them, but if I hold them near me, it imbues me with a sense of powerful intelligence.
A novel must give a sense of permanence as well as a sense of life.
I think people are much more concerned about money now. There aren't the big advances of the past. You feel the sense of nervousness about the book industry. It's not like before. Not that I knew very much about what it was like because I was a newcomer to it, but I get that feeling that people are more conservative in their book choices and what they are going to publish and what's a sure sell. As opposed to - just like in the economy - a sense of luxury and sense of risk taking ten years ago.
There's a sense of trajectories that are extraordinary about a life like this. You can reconnect with people and go back to playing with them after years and years of not even knowing if they're alive.
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