Paranoid Style Quotes

The idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant. ~ Richard Hofstadter

As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated–if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid's sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes. ~ Richard Hofstadter

So exiled have even basic questions of freedom become from the political vocabulary that they sound musty and ridiculous, and vulnerable to the ultimate badge of shame-'That's so 60's!'-the entire decade having been mocked so effectively that social protest seems outlandish and 'so last century,' just another style excess like love beads and Nehru jackets. No, rebellion won't pose a problem for this social order. ~ Laura Kipnis

Once you develop your own style, you know when you're able to give your best. Feeling at home is part of it, and I don't think that's an L.A. thing. It's a matter of the environment and of what affects you. ~ Herb Ritts

He wore a delicate ring with a tiny sleepy diamond embedded in the latticed gold band. He said, "My wife chose this wedding ring for me. It's Victorian, not really my style, but it reminds me of her." And then he said, "My wife crashed the car again." Ah, I thought, as we walked past the golden trees, she does not have a name. She is a wife. I wondered why my male colleague often forgot the names of most of the women he met at social events. He would always refer to them as someone's wife or girlfriend, as if that was all I needed to know.

If we don't have names, who are we? ~ Deborah Levy

I feel like certain people think that certain styles of music will taint their jazz style. ~ Robert Glasper

It was a father, one hand resting teapot-style on his hip, and the other - what would be the spout - formed into a fist. ~ David Sedaris

I changed my writing style deliberately. My first two novels were written in a very self-consciously literary way. After I embraced gay subject matter, which was then new, I didn't want to stand in its way. I wanted to make the style as transparent as possible so I could get on with it and tell the story, which was inherently interesting. ~ Edmund White

When the old way of seeing was displaced, a hollowness came into architecture. Our buildings show a constant effort to fill that void, to recapture that sense of life which was once to be found in any house or shed. Yet the sense of place is not to be recovered through any attitude, device, or style, but through the principles of pattern, spirit, and context. - Jonathan Hale, The Old Way of Seeing, 1994 ~ Jonathan Hale

I have a lot of Japanese fans, but in Korea they seem to go crazy for me. I don't know what it is, but they seem to like my style. ~ Shu Qi

There's nothing wrong with wearing a hat and cowboy boots if you want to be a country singer. But when you open your mouth, have something new to say. Have your own style. ~ Pam Tillis

You will criticize me, reader, for writing in a style six hundred years removed from the events I describe, but you came to me for explanation of those days of transformation which left your world the world it is, and since it was the philosophy of the Eighteenth Century, heavy with optimism and ambition, whose abrupt revival birthed the recent revolution, so it is only in the language of the Enlightenment, rich with opinion and sentiment, that those days can be described. You must forgive me my 'thee's and 'thou's and 'he's and 'she's, my lack of modern words and modern objectivity. It will be hard at first, but whether you are my contemporary still awed by the new order, or an historian gazing back at my Twenty-Fifth Century as remotely as I gaze back on the Eighteenth, you will find yourself more fluent in the language of the past than you imagined; we all are. ~ Ada Palmer

I'm not paranoid, no. I'm different in that I have enemies. Very real ones. ~ Gore Vidal

Some acts are tricky. Eartha Kitt was tricky in a wonderful, old-style way. She did yoga on the piano and put her hands over her ears when the other acts were on. ~ Jools Holland

Opening up a newspaper is the key to looking classy and smart. Never mind the bronze-plated stuff about the role of the press in a democracy - a newspaper, kiddo, is about Style. ~ Garrison Keillor

When I was studying at Berklee, I got the feeling I couldn't play the [guitar] at all, because I could not use my own things as they didn't fit any set pattern. When I joined [Chico Hamilton], he helped me immensely to develop my own style. He never forced me in any set way. At all times, he encouraged me to be myself on the instrument. ~ Gabor Szabo

Do not just go through the day without pausing to ponder! You shall only retire wondering. ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

John Michell's The Dimensions of Paradise is inarguably among the most important Gnostic transmissions of recent generations. With his candid, uncomplicated style, John has made widely available the visions, the laws, and the numbers held within pure geometry and which integrate earth and sky, movement and form, cosmos and mankind. ~ Robert Lawlor

Italy's assets are her style, her beauty, her creativity, her passion, her energy, her technology; and these will be core brand values of all our cars. Fiat as a company has a long way to go and a steep road ahead. ~ Lapo Elkann

Style is character. ~ Joan Didion

The style of mustache I have is called a Hungarian, and you need a certain type of viscosity in the wax to make it work. ~ Justin Hawkins

In the present time you don't really establish what you're going through, but after time it's declared something. Right now there could be some writers doing something expressing their thoughts in a whole different style that we're not aware of. This could be the 'in-between the notes generation.' ~ Garrett Hedlund

Usually, Shakespeare gives me goose bumps. The guy knows everything. Like some ancient angel quill-ing out blueprints life. Hiding it in fiction. And usually I love the sound of the words, the way they dance on the page. Today, they fall flat. My attention bobbing in the cosmos. All free brain-space is marinating in gap month fizz. I chew my pen, candy-cane style. The million possibilities ahead make it hard to care about right now. I write my answers slowly, each letter carved in stone not ballpoint. I'm going to explore the world, find my passion, try everything! The fizz shoots up my spine and a smile sprouts. ~ Jolene Stockman

It was in reading Tristam Shandy that I noticed how it is primarily men who gravitate towards the game-playing self-reflexive style. There is an alienation from emotion in it, a Nervous Nelly fear of letting go and being "exposed." As an attitude towards life, it betrays a perpetual adolescence. Those who hurled themselves after Derrida were not the most sophisticated but the most pretentious, and least creative members of my generation of academics. ~ Camille Paglia

Style makes you feel great because it takes your mind off the fact that you're going to die. ~ Isaac Mizrahi

Yet Aristotle's excellence of substance, so far from being associated with the grand style, is associated with something that at times comes perilously near jargon. ~ Irving Babbitt

If you can say a thing with one stroke, unanswerably you have style; if not, you are at best a marchande de plaisir; a decorative litt ~ George Bernard Shaw

Elegance is always in style for men. ~ Donatella Versace

My relationship had ended and Red had taken my son. My life was my own and I could do anything I wanted, yet I felt nothing. As I stood staring at the walls, searching inside myself for some kind of emotional response, the nothingness suddenly welled up inside me, like a physical mass, so vast and empty and infinite I was terrified. The very first time I went running, it was from that terror, from the possibility of being sucked down into emptiness for ever, and as I ran I discovered I was able to feel; pressure in my lungs, pain in my legs, my skin perspiring, the pounding of my heart.
My routine was erratic, I ran when I felt like it, usually five or six times a month. So was my style. It was nothing like that of the runners I grew accustomed to seeing, the ones who regulated themselves, jogged two or three times a week, who did a warm-up first and stretching exercises afterwards, the people for whom the activity was a hobby. I ran like my life depended on it, as fast and as hard as I could. Sometimes, passers-by would look beyond me as I ran towards them, with fear in their eyes, trying to see who or what was pursuing me, trying to work out whether they should be running too. As long as I was feeling, I didn't care. ~ Yvvette Edwards

The inclusion of slope style in the Olympics is cool. I think it's going to be a total breath of fresh air. The Olympics needs us more than we need it. ~ Nick Goepper

I kept my whole life in suitcase,
Never really stayed in one place,
Maybe that's the way it should be,
You know I live my life like a gypsy. ~ Shinedown

It is an Akido style of martial art. The family disturber throws their disturbance at me like a punch, and I flow with it and its energy, while taking care of myself and my opponent. In Mindell's work, an attitude of eldership means the elder uses dance to dance freely between the energy of the disturber and the energy of the one disturbed. In Mindell's talk, he explains that when we get down to this level, we are in Process Mind or into the mind behind the system itself. ~ Gary Reiss

Did you ever notice how easy it is to forgive a person any number of faults for one endearing characteristic, for a certain style, or some commitment to life - while someone with many good qualities is insupportable for a single defect if it happens to be a boring one? ~ Shirley Hazzard

It doesn't take money to have style, it just takes a really good eye. Sometimes you can find amazing culinary antiques that will make it feel like an old French kitchen. ~ Tyler Florence

Greetings from sunny Seattle, where women are "gals," people are "folks," a little bit is a "skosh," if you're tired you're "logy," if something is slightly off it's "hinky," you can't sit Indian-style but you can sit "crisscross applesauce," when the sun comes out it's never called "sun" but always "sunshine," boyfriends and girlfriends are "partners," nobody swears but someone occasionally might "drop the f-bomb," you're allowed to cough but only into your elbow, and any request, reasonable or unreasonable, is met with "no worries."
Have I mentioned how much I hate it here? ~ Maria Semple

I was influenced by autobiographical writers like Henry Miller, and I had actually done some autobiographical prose. But I just thought that comics were like virgin territory. There was so much to be done. It excited me. I couldn't draw very well. I could write scripts and storyboard style using stick figures and balloons and captions. ~ Harvey Pekar

For an actor, style comes last. You first have to implement the whole thing, but your style comes from the subconscious, which is the best part an actor brings to his work. ~ Jack Nicholson

Soviet-style communism failed, not because it was intrinsically evil, but because it was flawed. It allowed too few people to usurp too much power. Twenty-first century market capitalism, American-style, will fail for the same reasons. Both are edifices constructed by human intelligence, undone by human nature. ~ Arundhati Roy

The paradoxical intercourse of audience and celebrity.The suppressed awareness that the whole reason ordinary people found celebrity fascinating was that they were not, themselves, celebrities. That wasn't quite it. (....) It was more the deeper, more tragic and universal conflict of which the celebrity paradox was a part. The conflict between the subjective centrality of our own lives versus our awareness of its objective insignificance. Atwater knew - as did everyone at Style, though by some strange unspoken consensus it was never said aloud - that this was the single great informing conflict of the American psyche. The management of insignificance. It was the great syncretic bond of US monoculture. It was everywhere, at the root of everything - of impatience in long lines, of cheating on taxes, of movements in fashion and music and art, of marketing. In particular, he thought it was alive in the paradoxes of audience. It was the feeling that celebrities were your intimate friends, coupled with the inchoate awareness that that untold millions of people felt the same way - and that the celebrities themselves did not. Atwater had had contact with a certain number of celebrities (there was no way to avoid it at BSG), and they were not, in his experience, very friendly or considerate people. Which made sense when one considered that celebrities were not actually functioning as real people at all, but as something more like symbols of themselves. ~ David Foster Wallace

I'm just not the glamour type. Glamour girls are born, not made. And the real ones can be glamorous even if they don't wear magnificent clothes. I'll bet Lana Turner would look glamorous in anything. ~ Teresa Wright

If she could get into the one here at The Texas Player's Club, she'd drag Trace Corbin out by his ass, stick her arm up it, and do his entire set ventriloquist style if she had do. ~ Caisey Quinn

I had really no sense of style. Everyone around me in my family had the sense of style - I learned as much as I possibly could. ~ Caitlyn Jenner

My outfit said style but casual. They say clothes make a statement. Hey, mine made a whole conversation. ~ Jax Abbott

Did you ever ask yourself if each one of us pursued a high educational degree, who would do the skilled manual work? Craftsmanship may not earn us the money we want but that does not mean we should scorn on anyone doing it. We are obliged to be respectful and grateful to anyone using their hands to clean our households, trim our hedges,carpentry our furniture, farm our food, crafts the objects we collect and gift, style our hairs, etc. Next time you encounter a crafts person acknowledge their manual competence. ~ Gloria D. Gonsalves

Frazier said that the Negro middle class had borrowed its bourgeois style and traditional religion from the white middle class, which was itself intellectually and culturally barren. Black people should look to their own heritage, he said, create their own culture. ~ Howard Zinn

Pope Benedict XVI's resignation is big on buzz but is not the stunning surprise claimed by many pundits. It is rather a further example of the German theology professor's style that informed his years as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, his term as pope, and the formation of his legacy to the church. ~ Eugene Kennedy

Bill Sofield has the ability to understand the architecture of a space and how to utilize it in the most beautiful way. He can create completely different styles for his clients based on who they are and what their taste is. Our efforts have always been collaborative, and I value what he brings to the table architecturally and aesthetically. ~ Tom Ford

I loathe narcissism, but I approve of vanity. ~ Diana Vreeland

The thing about Dickens is you either love him or you hate him and I fell in love with Dickens, I fell in love with his prose style and I decided that I wanted to read the whole Dickens verve during the course of my life. ~ George Brandis

I don't follow fashion. I need people to style me because I'm pretty clueless about it and I don't really care. I pretty much wear the same outfit every day when I'm not working. ~ Megan Fox