Iris Apfel Quotes

You can only judge anything that happened in the times, in the times that that happened.

Customary though it may be to write about that institutionalized pastime as though it existed apart from the general environment, my story does not lend itself to such treatment.

A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.

Every intellectual product must be judged from the point of view of the age and the people in which it was produced.

Food is interesting to me because it's a way of understanding culture and societies and history. I would never write about food just as food. Just like I would never write about baseball just as baseball.

We must understand the motives and forces of our time and analyze their structure from three points of view: the material, the functional, and the spiritual. We must make clear in what respects our epoch differs from others and in what respects it is similar.

I really have the good fortune that the actors who work with me on 'The Leftovers' are thoughtful, hard working, open people and generous people.

Politics disappears; it vanishes. What remains constant is human life. So I try to develop a perspective in my writing where politics is just one of the pieces of furniture in this furnished world. It is not the purpose. It is not the goal.

The great thing about being the son of Maya Angelou is that I had the good fortune to grow up around some of the greatest black artists, dancers, singers, musicians, and actors of our time.

One side of me is very busy paying attention to the details of life, the humanity of people, catching the street voices, the middle-class, upper-middle-class secret lives of Turks. The other side is interested in history and class and gender, trying to get all of society in a very realistic way.

A lot of people can have a lot of different influences, everyone can be compared in some way to someone whether they are from 60 years ago or more recent.

Man is a child of his environment.

I love the TV show, and if you make a bad movie it means you've soiled it. Just like if we made an advert. We were offered so many times and I'd say, look, this is the good thing, and you can't compromise that, because then you compromise the integrity of the characters.

I think it's part of the responsibility of an artist to shock, to upset, to make people think differently, and to surprise people. And that's where the good humor is, if there's a surprise and there's something unexpected. Something that's not normal, not in the realm of general living expectations.

History is what we bring to it, not just the events themselves, but how we interpret those events.

I'm also fascinated by the interplay between personal history and the larger forces that form the context for our lives.

I don't know what life was like 1,000 years ago, but I imagine there was the same struggle: people trying to connect with each other.

I got history solidly under my belt, reading Russian history and biographies. I couldn't change the facts. I could only play with how the people might have responded to the facts of their lives.

I was still in college when 'To Kill a Mockingbird' came out in 1960. I remember it had a kind of an electrifying effect on this country; this was a time when there were a lot of good books coming out.

Most social acts have to be understood in their setting and lose meaning if isolated... No error in thinking about social facts is more serious than the failure to see their place and function.

It's very important to always put things in their historical contexts. It teaches important lessons about the country in question.

We can be revisionist, and that's a good thing to be at times, but we shouldn't airbrush our history, so we can only make judgments in the objective conditions of that time.

I think in this, definitely, because you are feeling how it felt to live in a completely different time. The mannerisms and the way that people behaved was quite different.

I simply wanted to state that during this little slice of history, this is what happened and these were the good sides of it, these were the more dangerous sides of it, and this was the result.

The good of other times let people state; I think it lucky I was born so late.