Laurie R. King Quotes

For many societies, the journey to modernity has been painful and costly.

Until the last great war, a general expectation of material improvement was an idea peculiar to Western man. Now war and its aftermath have made economic and social progress a political imperative in every quarter of the globe.

In the early '20s, with the war over, there was a period of celebration, and you can see it in the fashion.

I much prefer the modern world.

When I was a student there in the mid-1990s, they had just created the weekend; depth and individuality were slowly returning after the austere, colorless low of the 1970s. When I returned to live in China from 2005 to 2013, the country was building everything anew.

The adverse economic events following the First World War turned me toward economics.

Sometimes a time dictates what a film will be. Sometimes a film dictates what the time will be.

After World War II society had to settle back for a moment before it picked up the 20th century.

Culturally, the First World War is the war that stands in for other wars.

When I moved to Beijing in 2005 to write, I was accustomed to hearing the story of China's transformation told in vast, sweeping strokes - involving one fifth of humanity and great pivots of politics and economics.

The war changed everybody's attitude. We became international almost overnight.

My grandfather was originally from the south of China before he emigrated to Malaysia pre-World War II. And I wanted to learn more about the history of the country of my ancestors. I knew I wanted a narrative set in contemporary Beijing. I was really interested in the effect of the rapid social and economic change on ordinary citizens in China.

Well, I actually grew up in the sixties. I feel very lucky, actually, that that was my slice of time that I was dealt. Let's remember that the real motivation in the sixties, and even in the fifties, was the Cold War.

I'm fascinated by the period that goes from the Industrial Revolution to right after World War II. There's something about that period that's epic and tragic.

I came to live in Shepperton in 1960. I thought: the future isn't in the metropolitan areas of London. I want to go out to the new suburbs, near the film studios. This was the England I wanted to write about, because this was the new world that was emerging.

Of late years (perhaps as a result of our political changes) art has borrowed from history more than ever.

We now know how things were in the '60s and how things have changed, but I don't think we appreciate how much things have changed.

I got married and I had children because of the Second World War, as all of us did, exclaiming, 'Oh, no, we are never going to bring a child into this wicked world,' but we had children by the dozen and got married.

My father was in the First World War.

The deeper changes wrought by the end of a particular outlaw culture: something will come of that ... and it won't be what we expect.

Ireland is a peculiar society in the sense that it was a nineteenth century society up to about 1970 and then it almost bypassed the twentieth century.

They really do a disservice because these men and women came out of the Depression, they came out of the war.

If sexual intercourse, as the poets tell us, began in 1963, it was another decade and a half before the American political system began to take notice.

The '90s will be looked back on as ushering in an era of comfort.

The truth is, of course, that history is not completed in modern commerce any more than philosophy is perfected in political economy. In other words, there is nothing timeless or God-given about filling stations and penicillin and plastic bags.