Mark E. Smith Quotes

I am a common man. Why do I need security?

Writing is like sex. The more you think about it, the harder it is to do. It's better not to think about it so much and just let it happen.

Liberty and security are often in direct confrontation and must be balanced in a way that protects us without destroying what is worth protecting.

We are living in a world where everything is based on security.

Perfect security means nobody’s there at all.

We all want security …. But we don’t need to simplify the debate to such an extent that we simply say we have to give up our liberties.

Anything can be justified by security.

Freedom would be meaningless without security in the home and in the streets.

We cannot sacrifice our humanity in the name of security - or we risk losing both.

When I travel officially... and when I travel on a private basis, I have protection that is less suffocating. But I am protected everywhere.

If the concern is security, there needs to be evidence-backed policies to increase security and safety, while maintaining our liberties and freedoms. Policies that clamp down on freedoms and don't increase security empirically need to be outright rejected.

When I make a film, I don't watch a lot of other films. I read a lot; I try to read poems, things that can liberate my human condition, that make me go away... I spend a lot of the time doing nothing, just concentrating on the subject. Sometimes I'll sit in my chair for two or three hours without doing anything.

They wanted to come in after the pounds", explained Pooh, "so I let them. It's the best way to write poetry, letting things come.

Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy.

Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

How well I would write if I were not here!

When we are writing, or painting, or composing, we are, during the time of creativity, freed from normal restrictions, and are opened to a wider world, where colors are brighter, sounds clearer, and people more wondrously complex than we normally realize.

In writing one draws in the rest, the forgotten parts.

Carelessness about our security is dangerous, carelessness about our freedom is also dangerous.

As writers we live life twice, like a cow that eats its food once and then regurgitates it to chew and digest it again. We have a second chance at biting into our experience and examining it. ...This is our life and it's not going to last forever. There isn't time to talk about someday writing that short story or poem or novel. Slow down now, touch what is around you, and out of care and compassion for each moment and detail, put pen to paper and begin to write.

I just write about what I feel I want to write about. I'm like a kid. I get an idea, and it's like a kid's toy that you push and tug around the room. It's fun, it's bright, it's pretty and maybe it'll go clack-clack or whiz-whiz, whatever it happens to do. I like to make believe.

I'm not a writer. I marvel at writing. I am sometimes absolutely astounded when I read something and I think how in the world did that man or that woman sit down at a typewriter, a computer or a pen and an ink well, and seemingly have nothing come between their heart and that pen.

You either have an imaginative mind or you don't. All of my writing is God-given. I don't write my stories - they write themselves.

Writing is like making love. Don't worry about the orgasm, just concentrate on the process.