Virgil Thomson Quotes

It is worse than immoral, it's a mistake.

I guess I am running the risk of becoming the Hans Christian Andersen of opera.

When I look back I can't believe I was so stupid as to direct Dealer's Choice.

The biggest mistake that I have made in my life is choosing Najib.

I hesitated for all the right reasons. And I accepted for all the wrong ones.

Culinary science? You elected culinary science? That's the most brainless class ever. -Rose to Christian

THERE IS A PERIOD WHEN IT IS CLEAR THAT YOU HAVE GONE WRONG BUT YOU CONTINUE. SOMETIMES THERE IS A LUXURIOUS AMOUNT OF TIME BEFORE ANYTHING BAD HAPPENS.

I think I got into acting because I kind of had not much else to do! I guess I was kind of looking for something challenging. I heard about the London Theater scene and it was very different from the upbringing that I had and it felt like a challenge. And the whole sort of London Theater schools, I was told that 6,000 apply and there are like 30 accepted to each one. I was like, "Yeah. Let's see if we can do that!"

The problem with life is, we often do things that will ultimately be self-destructive and make us unhappy, yet in that moment it seems like the best idea in the world. You have to be careful of moments - they're tricksy things.

The mentality has taken over because of the way we've promoted things. It's been accepted, to live with fear, and to fear that it's going to be terrible, prepare for the worst. The meat and potato of our existence right now is influenced by what happened after 9/11 - we put our thinking into protecting borders.

More investment sins are probably committed by otherwise quite intelligent people because of "tax considerations" than from any other cause. One of my friends-a noted West Coast philosopher-maintains that a majority of life's errors are caused by forgetting what one is really trying to do. This is certainly the case when an emotionally supercharged element like taxes enters the picture (I have another friend-a noted East Coast philosopher who says it isn't the lack of representation he minds-it's the taxation).

I am descended from a very long line my mother once foolishly listened to.

It's not that I don't know that it's a bad idea. It's that, lately, bad ideas have a particular hold over me.

It's a shame that cancer has been something that's been accepted in society as something that's always gonna be there.

Surely being in love doesn't cause you to lose your sense of good taste. If I ever buy a gown with sequins on it, someone just shoot me.

Bad acting, like bad writing, has a remarkable uniformity, whether seen on the French, German, or English stages; it all seems modeled after two or three types, and those the least like types of good acting. The fault generally lies less in the bad imitation of a good model, than in the successful imitation of a bad model.

I received my calling and accepted it at around 18.

A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.

Poetry's magic lies in the imagery which satifies even without interpretation..it is accepted as easily as it was created.

There doesn't seem like there should be an artful way to butcher a cow, but there is, and this is not it.

I always thought I could coach. I just thought people were poor judges of good coaches.

Once we have accepted the story we cannot escape the story's fate.

George W. Bush in 2000 went to private financing for the nomination, but he accepted public funding in the general. And, quite frankly, so did - it was broken in 2008, when Barack Obama decided he wasn't going to do that.

The rush to books and universities is like the rush to the public house. People want to drown their realization of the difficulties of living properly in this grotesque contemporary world, they want to forget their own deplorable inefficiency as artists in life.

I've always been able to make erroneous decisions very quickly.