Justin Vernon Quotes

I went to University in 1991, and I remember, nobody thought of India. I remember conversations where people would laugh and say, "Do you have elephants on the road?" Nobody is saying that today.

But if it ever occurs to people to value the honor of the mind equally with the honor of the body, we shall get a social revolution of a quite unparalleled sort — and very different from the kind that is being made at the moment.

I'm very bright, but I'm terrified of sounding like someone who thinks he's very bright-because those people are assholes.

We live in a very special time right now. At no other time in history has there been such mass disillusionment in terms of reliance on governing functions. Most people don’t want to come to terms with that. It’s been proven over and over again that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes, but most people don’t like to look at naked emperors. In the process of turning around to avert their eyes, they saw the discotheques and a few other things and latched onto them.

There's a lot of terminology, like "washes whiter than snow," and these things which when they're said in a uniracial congregation, they just go fine. But when they're said in a mixed congregation, some people will get offended and wonder, "Why are you saying that? What are you saying?"

Something as beautiful and natural as male-female relationships have been perhaps inalterably politicized, and politicized from the standpoint that men are the predators and that men are brutes and that men are uncaring, what have you, all to get the female vote. And I just sense people are getting fed up with it entirely. They may not even know specifically why. But it's just one of the seeming gazillion things that just are not right in America and out of whack.

Ordinary fools are all right; you can talk to them, and try to help them out. But pompous fools-guys who are fools and are covering it all over and impressing people as to how wonderful they are with all this hocus pocus-THAT, I CANNOT STAND! An ordinary fool isn't a faker; an honest fool is all right. But a dishonest fool is terrible!

When I was starting out, science fiction was a little genre over there, which only a few people read. But now -- where are you going to put, for example, Salman Rushdie? Or any of the South American writers? Most people get by calling them magical realists.

It turns out a lot of people don't get it. Wikipedia is like rock'n'roll; it's a cultural shift.

I think when people talk about improvising it turns into this silly thing like, "Oh there's like a hula hoop there and I'm like 'Oh what's going on here? Is this a really big ring?'"

You're 25 and you're looking at adults of your parents' age and older saying, "I don't want to live that way," and this is how it happens. It evolves slowly and it's not the result of any movement. It's just young people look at the way their parents are living and if they don't like it they don't want to duplicate it.

Most people are much better at saying things in letters than in conversation, and some people can write artistic, inventive letters, but when they try a poem or story or novel they become pretentious.

The stupidest thing she knew was for people to act like they knew all about the things they knew absolutely nothing about.

Some say society must change in order to change people. No, people must be changed in order to change society.

How many people become abstract as a way of appearing profound.

Most people love you for who you pretend to be.

It is terrifying to people when women step up and start owning the story that they have not owned. And I'm seeing so much of this, and it is a seismic shift.

If you want to change a whole people, then you start with the girls. It stands to reason: they learn faster, and they pass on what they learn to their children.

These people also tended to pretend to care deeply about the blind and otherwise disabled. I am sympathetic to the needs of those users, but I can't help but think that those who claimed to speak for the blind were being more than a little disingenuous, just like those Hemp people who present their arguments in terms of their deep and abiding care for the textile industry, when their real motives are ... something else entirely.

The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally violent areseen daily on the newsstands, on TV, in the subways. Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.

Many people who pretend to be very busy have the least to do.

I was the type of person who was the question-asker. And not just genuine questions, I would ask a question so the author would know how much I knew about them. Once I went to a Tobias Wolff reading. I knew he was teaching at Syracuse at that time. And so, I remember asking him how he liked Syracuse. People do that to me now and it's okay. There is rarely a time when I just have had enough.

I believe that humans adapt to circumstance. The Internet is quite an unprecedented circumstance, so it's going to take people a while to get their heads around it.

I remember a time when it was ok to make fun of politicians and powerful people. Now, it's not ok anymore. We've forgotten how to laugh.

While so much of our economic life is thriving, too much of our moral life is still stagnating. As a people, we need to reaffirm our faith.