Chris Pavone Quotes

Mark Hopkins was one of the truest and best men that ever lived. He had a keen analytical mind; was thoroughly accurate, and took general supervision of the books, contracts, etc. He was strictly the office man, and never bought or sold anything. I always felt when I was in the East that our business in his hands was entirely safe.

We do not read in order to turn great works of fiction into simplistic replicas of our own realities, we read for the pure, sensual, and unadulterated pleasure of reading. And if we do so, our reward is the discovery of the many hidden layers within these works that do not merely reflect reality but reveal a spectrum of truths, thus intrinsically going against the grain of totalitarian mindsets.

It wasn't that I had gotten it right . . . but that I had gotten true.

I believe I am looking for rightness. My work has so much to do with reality that I wanted to have a corresponding rightness. That excludes painting in imitation. In nature everything is always right: the structure is right, the proportions are good, the colours fit the forms. If you imitate that in painting, it becomes false.

What an ideology is is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to, to exist you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not.

Knowledge, like experience, is valid in fiction only after it has dissolved and filtered down through the imagination into reality.

Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape.

There's a great quote from Henry Kissinger, which I became aware of from reading [Joseph] Heller's Good As Gold. He said: 'Every great achievement was a dream before it became a reality.'

For will anyone dare to tell me that business is more entertaining than fooling among boats? He must have never seen a boat, or never seen an office, who says so.

We should always bear in mind that numbers represent a simplification of reality.

It is a task of art to express clear vision of reality.

I've always been one to arrive early for work; preparation is a big part of how I work, and I like to be in my office going through plans for the upcoming training sessions or meetings I have.

We should treat computers as fancy telephones, whose purpose is to connect people.... As long as we remember that we ourselves are the source of our value, our creativity, our sense of reality, then all of our work with computers will be worthwhile and beautiful.

Decide, before you start, that you're going to change three things about what you do all day at work. Then, as you're reading, find the three things and do it. The goal of the reading, then, isn't to persuade you to change, it's to help you choose what to change.

What is true is true, and what is false is false.

It's an Obama book, certainly. I was delighted, and astonished, to hear recently that he was reading it. It's a book about a new kind of American reality, one that takes diversity for granted. It doesn't celebrate diversity, actually, it just says: this is how we live now.

Meetings are by definition a concession to deficient organization. For one either meets or one works.

When the product is right, you don't have to be a great marketer.

Most people simply don't view going to meetings as doing work.

The gossip might make better reading, but the simple fact of the matter is that it isn't true.

I wish to reproduce things as they are or as they would be even if I myself did not exist.

I remember reading an article about this idea of borderline personality disorder, which is reality producers try the find people who are sort of flamboyantly anti-social in these certain ways, because what happens when you put them around other people is they drag everyone down to their level. I feel like I'm watching this disgraceful race to the bottom.

We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep to the real and the true.

The more effort we make to appreciate and perceive reality, the larger and more accurate our maps will be. But many do not want to make this effort.