Perceived importance Quotes

Nobody wants to hear that you met Harry Truman... I met Harry Truman... But you know what I mean? Nobody's interested. They want to know you met Rihanna. And that kills me.

What I do quite honestly and seriously and not in any way being humble is not as important as what the garbage collector does. People make actors important.

Just because a lot of people know something nominal doesn't make it important. A lot of people know what a pencil sharpener is, but that doesn't make it the most important invention of the 20th century.

It's so easy to think that this [celebrity] is reality; that people are lining up outside just to write down what I have to say. That's not real; that's weird.

The ring always believes that the finger lives for it.

Everybody thinks that an important book has to be a big, long book.

On my first day at Yale Law School, there were posters in the hallways announcing an event with Tony Blair, the former British prime minister. I couldn't believe it: Tony Blair was speaking to a room of a few dozen students? If he came to Ohio State, he would have filled an auditorium of a thousand people.

It is very often nothing but our own vanity that deceives us. Women fancy admiration means more than it does. And men take care that they should.

A lot of actors think that what we do is so important, like we're saving people's lives or something.

The American way of stress is comparable to Freud's 'beloved symptom', his name for the cherished neurosis that a patient cultivates like the rarest of orchids and does not want to be cured of. Stress makes Americans feel busy, important, and in demand, and simultaneously deprived, ignored, and victimized. Stress makes them feel interesting and complex instead of boring and simple, and carries an assumption of sensitivity not unlike the Old World assumption that aristocrats were high-strung. In short, stress has become a status symbol.

To appear to be on the inside and know more than others about what is going on is a great temptation for most people. It is a rare person who is willing to seem to know less than he does ... Somehow, people seem to feel that it is belittling to their importance not to know more than other people.

The more you think about something, the more important it becomes, the more important it is to you, and the more important it will become to the audience.

Our time and attention is scarce. Art is not that important to us, no matter what we might like to believe.

Consequently, most of us really exist at the mercy of other people's formulations of what's important.

The people at the very top could fall by and grace you with their presence and give you a little largesse, and you'd be "Oh, I'm so beloved." In a way, it was kind of like flattery. The middle managers didn't quite have that cachet, but at the same time, they had to seem like they were of that caliber. So there's a little bit of loneliness at the heart of those with a little bit of power.

Each present joy or sorrow seems the chief.

Do you know who takes weekday shuttle flights between Washington and New York? People who think they are too important for the train, let alone the bus.

I feel that my work is not in vain, that it does have a place in society, even though it may not be considered that it has a place in society - it doesn't matter.

Personal’s not the same as important. People just think it is.

Something may have happened before, and yet this thing that happened just after may be so important that you don't even know about the thing that happened before and when you tell your story to yourself, or to someone else, it's going to be told not on the basis necessarily of the time course, but rather on the basis of how it was valued by you.

You're not really necessarily the coolest guy in their life. You are a conduit to the really cool people.

I smile, now, thinking: we all like to think we are important enough to need psychiatrists

People change their opinion according to your position. And both politicians and bureaucrats begin to take you more seriously, as they suddenly feel you have become more important.

It is less mortifying to believe one's self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness.

So many things that seemed crucial and excruciatingly hard ended and then didn't matter anymore, forever after