Brion Quotes

Since very early in my career, I have always did my own stunt fighting. ~ Brion James

We must face the ultimate contradiction that our free and democratic society was made possible by massive slave labor. ~ David Brion Davis

Producing is nothing more than bringing all the elements together, connecting people. ~ Brion James

Wake up - time to die. ~ Brion James

Larry Kasdan is a great director. ~ Brion James

< ... > many national leaders including Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, John Adams, John Jay, Gouverneur Morris, and Rufus King saw American slavery as an immense problem, a curse, a blight, or a national disease. If the degree of their revulsion varied, they agreed that the nation would be much safer, purer, happier, and better off without the racial slavery that they had inherited from previous generations and, some of them would emphasize, from England. Most of them also believed that America would be an infinitely better and less complicated place without the African American population, which most white leaders associated with all the defects, mistakes, sins, shortcomings, and animality of an otherwise almost perfect nation. ~ David Brion Davis

People's association with improvisation means one person playing an endless stream of notes over something, and it doesn't have to be. ~ Jon Brion

As far as I'm concerned, any work you get is because people have heard other work you've done. ~ Jon Brion

You should never do two things. You should hammer one nail all your life, and I didn't do that; I hammered on a lot of nails like a xylophone. ~ Brion Gysin

I'm a parrot. I can pick up an accent and just do it. ~ Brion James

If a novelist were so uncouth and possessed of so little moral sense that he should write of illicit love, his book would be barred from the public libraries and he woukd be ostracized by society. ~ Clyde Brion Davis

The resulting texts always took a narrative term, enigmatic at first but ultimately explicit and often premonitory. The semantic distribution of these basic elements diverted them from their original meaning, thus revealing their real significance. Henceforth, every form of writing will consist of an operation of decoding, of contamination, and of sense perversion. All this because all language is essentially mystification, and everything is fiction. ~ Brion Gysin

Work begets work. ~ Brion James

Humans are no less eager than in the past to dominate, degrade, humiliate, and control - often in order to confirm their own sense of pride and superiority. (Adam Smith wrote in 1776 that this was the main motive for slavery.) But ~ David Brion Davis

It may not be the "Great American Novel" they talk about, because its scope is not broad enough to take in all of America, but it pictures the people and the customs and the drama of upstate New York in the days preceding and following the Civil War with a simplicity that, to my mind, is true art. ~ Clyde Brion Davis

Music looks very formidable to people outside of it and it looks like it's this realm of spooky genius. ~ Jon Brion

Writing is fifty years behind painting. ~ Brion Gysin

It was the mission of the Confederacy, ordinary whites were told, to carry out God's design for an inferior and dependent race. Slaveholders claimed that owning slaves always entailed a duty and a burden - a duty and burden that defined the moral superiority of the South. And this duty and burden was respected by millions of nonslaveholding whites, who were prepared to defend it with their lives. That, perhaps, was the ultimate meaning of a slave society. ~ David Brion Davis

I prayed to God for help and I put myself in a recovery house called Studio 12. It was for people in the business and you didn't have to have any money to go, which was good because I was broke. ~ Brion James

We have seen the death of Republicanism, of special privilege and national boodle. ~ Clyde Brion Davis

Man is a bad animal.... ~ Brion Gysin

I'll have you understand the United States has got the best navy in the world."
"Well, . . . why, then, do we need a bigger navy?"
"We've got to have a still bigger navy because we're the richest nation on earth. ~ Clyde Brion Davis

I could easily blast so much keef night and day I become a bouhali; a real-gone crazy, a holy untouchable madman unto whom everything is permitted, nothing is true. ~ Brion Gysin

You know, stand-up comedy is where I pretty much started out. ~ Brion James

The idea was that we would decide the order when we looked at the proofs. I remember Brion Gysin saying "Well, why change it? It's perfect the way it is, the way it came from the printer." Made one major change, that is, the first chapter that came from the printers, which would be the beginning, we moved to the end. The first chapter became the last chapter. There's no actual cutups in Naked Lunch. ~ William S. Burroughs

Some Southerners effectively applied slave labor to the cultivation of corn, grain, and hemp (for making rope and twine), to mining and lumbering, to building canals and railroads, and even to the manufacture of textiles, iron, and other industrial products. Nevertheless, no other American region contained so many white farmers who merely subsisted on their own produce. The "typical" white Southerner was not a slaveholding planter but a small farmer who tried, often without success, to achieve both relative self-sufficiency and a steady income from marketable cash crops. ~ David Brion Davis

Although the Civil War was an apocalyptic success in the sense that it brought an end to nearly a century of struggle and broken hopes regarding the ultimate extinction of African American slavery, it also combined new freedoms, as in other major revolutions, with shock, breakdown, trauma, and tragedy. Neither desired nor accurately anticipated by leaders in the North and South, the war dramatized the failure of the whole American system of political negotiation and compromise that had never weakened the institution of slavery but had supported democratic government for whites for over eighty years. < ... > Moreover, the long-term outcome of this revolutionary decision would be determined within a context of sectional hate and bitterness, political revenge, and competing presssures for reconciliation, reunion, and forgiveness. ~ David Brion Davis

When you get to be my age there are more and more people you have known that you miss. Brion [Gysin], Antony Balch, Ian Summerville are ones I think of right away I was quite close to. ~ William S. Burroughs

Much as slavery in the United States was part of a larger Atlantic Slave System, so America's War of Independence was an outgrowth of Europe's Seven Years' War - from 1756 to 1763 - and also a precursor or harbinger of the French and Haitian revolutions and of the subsequent Latin American wars for independence from Spain. ~ David Brion Davis

The first person who really showed me the ugly spirit was Brion Gysin. "The ugly spirit shot Joan because ... " and I never found out why. This Brion wrote out on a piece of paper in a sort of trance state. ~ Allen Ginsberg

The people I choose to work with, I work with because I'm already impressed with them, you know? ~ Jon Brion

I still do television. I don't care. I just want to work. I love to work. I want to do 500 movies. ~ Brion James

You never know what show is going to change your life. ~ Brion James

You really think that's where any of us are headed?" She actually gave him a grin, baring straight white teeth, her face lit by the golden glow of the dawn. It jarred him to realize that Brion had been right - this girl was absolutely gorgeous. "I'll see you in the darklands, Agallon. Save a demon or two for me. ~ Morgan Rhodes

<...> slaves became the major form of Southern wealth (aside from land), and slaveholding became the means to prosperity. <...> The later impoverishment of the South nourished the myth that the slave economy had always been historically "backward," stagnating, and unproductive. We now know that investment in slaves brought a considerable profit and that the Southern economy grew rapidly throughout the pre–Civil War decades. It is true, however, that the system depended largely on the international demand for cotton as the world entered the age of industrialization, led by the British textile industry. There was an increasing demand for clothing that was cheaper than linen and not as hot and heavy as wool. ~ David Brion Davis

Sad to say, in a present-day world that seems to be governed by clashing self
interests and material forces, where we have learned that idealistic rhetoric usually cloaks nationalistic purposes or even far more diabolical schemes, it has become increasingly difficult to explain collective actions that profess to be driven by virtuous ideals or a desire to make the world a better place. During the past century, various national leaders have ordered the slaughter of tens of millions of people as the supposedly necessary means to perfect the world. Today we are far more cynical, I fear, than the generations at the beginning of the past genocidal century, before the First World War and the Russian Revolution. ~ David Brion Davis

I'm big and a lot of the stars are smaller so if you're big and mean looking, you play bad guys. After Blade Runner, I was the meanest guy in Hollywood. ~ Brion James

Blade Runner helped make my career. Everybody was in it. Who knew? ~ Brion James

I enjoy inventing things out of fun. After all, life is a game, not a career. ~ Brion Gysin

My dad had a movie theater so I was there every night. ~ Brion James

Westerns was why I got into the business. I grew up on a small farm in California and all I ever wanted to do was to play gangsters and cowboys in movies. ~ Brion James

I was a different kind of kid, oversensitive and all that. ~ Brion James

I've made a point of not being, say what I refer to as a 'careerist' about anything. ~ Jon Brion

OFFICERS OF OUR GUERILLA MUST BE POETS.
THE AREA OF POETRY MUST BE CONSTANTLY RE-CREATED.
- Brion Gysin, Guerrilla Conditions, nd. ~ Brion Gysin

The bad guys are the best parts. ~ Brion James

She feels "Brutal Dynasty" actually may become the Great American Novel she and her fellow critics have been looking for so long. ~ Clyde Brion Davis

You need to think with your head, not only your heart."
He couldn't help but snort softly at that. "You think I'm using my heart right now?"
Brion rolled his eyes. "Yes. And in case there's any doubt, your heart is an idiot just like the rest of you ... ~ Morgan Rhodes

For ten thousand centimos, I'm tempted to turn you in myself,"Brion said.
Jonas snorted uneasily."For ten thousand centimos, I'm tempted to turn myself in. ~ Morgan Rhodes

I never play a villain that I don't have something I can either do or say so the audience sees there is something redeemable about them. In other words, I don't want to do evil for evil's sake. I don't want to do Jason slasher movies. There's no point in that. ~ Brion James

Taken as a whole, the last four administrations represent the culmination of a century of executive abuse. With each successive president from forty-one to forty-four the disease grew worse. By the time Obama leaves office in 2017, Americans will have suffered under twenty-eight consecutive years of unconstitutional executive usurpation of power. An elected king? The British taxpayer spends around $50 million annually to support the entire royal family. With an annual budget that exceeds $1 billion for expenses, including travel, the American president supplanted the British monarch in everything but a title long ago. ~ Brion McClanahan

The interesting part of the process is developing the character, you know, why did he become that? Why is the guy a murderer, or why is this guy a pervert, or whatever he is. So that's the fun part for me to delve into the abyss. ~ Brion James

It was so much fun conducting an orchestra and watching the musicians' faces as some of Kanye's lyrics went by. They couldn't believe what was going on. ~ Jon Brion

Some people are more fluid than others at just being themselves and recognizing what's good about themselves. ~ Jon Brion

I could talk about Blade Runner forever. ~ Brion James

The poets are supposed to liberate the words – not chain them in phrases. Who told the poets they were supposed to think? Poets are meant to sing and to make words sing. Writers don't own their words. Since when do words belong to anybody? 'Your very own words,' indeed! And who are you? ~ Brion Gysin

I couldn't say no to jobs and I couldn't say no to drugs. I'd get high from a movie, I'd be somebody else because I didn't particularly like me, so long as I had a script in my hand, I was okay. As soon as the movie was over, I didn't know what to do. ~ Brion James

Despite widespread attemps to equate human captives with domestic animals and even to market them and price them the same way < ... > slaves were fortunately never held long enough in a distinctive group to undergo genetic neoteny < ... >. Yet a kind of neoteny was clearly the goal of many slaveholders, even if they lacked a scientific understanding of how domestication changed the nature and behavior of animals. Aristotle's ideal of the "natural slave" was very close to what a human being would be like if subjected to a genetic change similar to that of domesticated plants and animals. ~ David Brion Davis

When I was younger, I looked at getting older as this process of getting less interested in things and becoming colder, and of finding less joy in the mystery of things. And I've found the exact opposite to be true. I find that I'm getting warmer, and that I'm more mystified by human interactions. ~ Jon Brion

If we're given a number of circumstances to deal with, the brain goes into this mode of trying to find a solution, and it's amazing how good we are at it. ~ Jon Brion

I did 125 films, and over 100 television shows, and you've never seen the same character twice. ~ Brion James