Michael Pollan Quotes

Philosophy is at its most engaged when it is impure. What is being recovered from the Ancient Greek model is not some lost idea of philosophy's pure essence, but the idea that philosophy is mixed up with everything else.

When you're writing a novel, you don't want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that. Reality simply consists of different points of view.

Amalgamation is a good word that I like to use - musically and in every way.

I was never a monist - always a diversitarian.

I have a different idea of a universal. It is of a universal rich with all that is particular, rich with all the particulars there are, the deepening of each particular, the coexistence of them all.

I think I'm a combination of very simple pleasures and the fact I've read a lot of books. I don't think it's a binary opposition across the board in humans and I think I'm an example that it's not. I'm hosting gay marriage rallies and I have tons of guns at home. There's a lot of middle ground in the world and I'm one of those people.

People are complex. You can be smart and still look hot. You can be a punk rocker yet have a refined vocabulary. It's all about this mashup that makes us who we are and I think that's a beautiful thing.

I always try to be a universalist, not a specialist.

It's not just that everyone has a story. It's that everyone has a thousand stories. Everyone is infinite.

All black women aren't sassy, loud, difficult, or subservient. We are, in fact, very complex and very diverse, living very complex and diverse lives. That point cannot be made enough.

I approach the world as a whole by taking an integrative approach, not a world of parts, and I like to bring different fields and disciplines together. The same is true with my preoccupation with cultural expression.

Randall Park and Ali Wong, they are so many things; they're not just one thing, they're bigger than just their identity.

I don't think of fashion as fashion or biology as biology.

I've never been a proponent of something monolithic.

Real people - everyone is not just one thing.

There is not one description of beauty - that in fact it has different faces, different stories, and different background, and it's important to embrace all of those.

I am a woman, and I am Jewish; I'm a film-maker, and I'm a writer, so you cannot just put me in one box.

Life has never been All or Nothing- it's All and Nothing. Forget the binaries.

I think that is something that I always like in my work - the sense of inclusion rather than the sense of otherness.

Life is not found in atoms or molecules or genes as such, but in organization; not in symbiosis but in synthesis.

Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.

Remember that when you say "I will have non of this exile and this stranger for his face is not like my face and his speech is strange," you have denied America with that word.

The enchanting, and sometimes terrifying, thing is that the world can be so many things to so many different souls. That it can be, and is, all these things at once and the same time.

I sort of feel like that's the most revolutionary thing we can do with our narrative for me as Black people is to show that we are just like you.

I'm not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That's how you make the new -- by putting something else with what you've got. And I'm unashamedly an American integrationist.