Tony Judt Quotes

Success sometimes can really bite you in the shorts.

The law of unintended consequences pushes us ceaselessly through the years, permitting no pause for perspective.

When I was growing up, I always read horror books, while my sister read romance novels. My sister became unmarried and pregnant during high school, and she kept saying, 'This wasn't supposed to happen! Why is this happening to me?' Someone should have given her another book to read.

Through shallow intellect, the mind becomes shallow, and one eats the fly, along with the sweets.

I certainly don't think you need to be famous to want to leave a legacy, but when you are famous, it's even more likely that your child will get the wrong perspective on your life if you die prematurely.

Accidents will happen in the best regulated families.

Life is full of what-ifs, many of which could easily have been realities, had just a few things been different.

I find that my entire life has come to me, and things happened without me planning them. You know, I never asked to photograph Princess Diana, and that made me more famous than I wanted. I never asked to photograph Madonna, and that pushed me to another level. There are things that just take you into the limelight.

I had arrived years ago in Paris and just wanted to be famous, fast. When you're pretentious like that, and you think you've planned everything perfectly, it's then that everything goes in the opposite way.

I did this one movie with a great director named Wayne Kramer. It was 'Crossing Over,' and Harrison Ford, Ashley Judd and Ray Liotta were in it. I was one of the leads, and I thought this was it. It got shelved for two years, and then it was in theaters maybe a week. After that, I adopted a philosophy of, 'Hope for the best, expect the worst.'

I usually destroy unreleased material. It has a way of coming back to haunt you.

I'm very pessimistic.

Ignorance of the facts of life gave me my beloved son, Dickon, but at what cost to both him and me, I cannot hazard a guess.

Man never legislates, but destinies and accidents, happening in all sorts of ways, legislate in all sorts of ways.

I guess it's easier to think badly and then be pleasantly surprised.

Often my characters don't know what the issues of the play are. They think they're doing one thing, but something else is actually orchestrating their lives.

I am sort of pessimistic in that way where I often think the worst of people.

The secret to a long-lasting relationship is perpetually imagining the worst. It's a world view tracing back to my Eastern European ancestry and one I draw upon regularly.

Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life.

Pessimism is my default setting.

I am a lazy, cynical, middle-aged guy who has long since come to the conclusion that most historical periods really sucked, for most people, most of the time.

Well I do think there are people who are habitually negative and depressed and take the opposite approach because they imagine the worst, and their minds become dominated by that. They let their own emotions and expectations transform their perceptions of the world.

My life is studded with a series of coincidences.

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

History goes out of control almost as often as nature does.