Serious Business Quotes - Page 2

• At the time we’re stuck in it, like hostages locked in a Turkish bath, high school seems the most serious business in the world to just about all of us. It’s not until the second or third class reunion that we start realizing how absurd the whole thing was.

  Stephen King

  School, Class, World

  Stephen King (2000). “On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft”, p.32, Simon and Schuster

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• The reader must come armed , in a serious state of intellectual readiness. This is not easy because he comes to the text alone. In reading, one's responses are isolated, one'sintellect thrown back on its own resourses. To be confronted by the cold abstractions of printed sentences is to look upon language bare, without the assistance of either beauty or community. Thus, reading is by its nature a serious business. It is also, of course, an essentially rational activity.

  Neil Postman

  Reading, Community, Intellectual

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• I'm working at trying to be a Christian, and that's serious business. It's like trying to be a good Jew, a good Muslim, a good Buddhist, a good Shintoist, a good Zoroastrian, a good friend, a good lover, a good mother, a good buddy: it's serious business.

  Maya Angelou

  Christian, Mother, Buddhist

  Interview with George Plimpton (Summer 1990), as published in "Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Ninth Series" edited by George Plimpton, July 1, 1992.

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• Basil Stag Hare tut-tutted severely as he remarked to Ambrose Spike, 'Tch, tch. Dreadful table manners. Just look at those three wallahs, kicking up a hullaballoo like that! Eating's a serious business.

  Brian Jacques

  Three, Kicking, Looks

  Brian Jacques (2013). “Redwall”, p.160, Random House

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• Writing has always been a serious business for me. I felt it was a moral obligation. A major concern of the time was the absence of the African voice. Being part of that dialogue meant not only sitting at the table but effectively telling the African story from an African perspective - in full earshot of the world.

  Chinua Achebe

  Writing, Voice, Perspective

  Chinua Achebe (2012). “There Was a Country: A Memoir”, p.47, Penguin

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• The point is seeing that THIS - the immediate, everyday and present experience - is IT, the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe. I believe that if this state of consciousness could become more universal, the pretentious nonsense which passes for the serious business of the world would dissolve in laughter.

  Alan Watts

  Happiness, Laughter, Believe

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• My point here, young couples, is that baby-having is extremely serious business, and you probably don't have the vaguest idea what you're doing, as is evidenced by the fact that you're reading a very sloppy and poorly researched book.

  Dave Barry

  Funny, Baby, Couple

  Dave Barry (1984). “Babies and Other Hazards of Sex: How to Make a Tiny Person in Only 9 Months, with Tools You Probably Have Around the Home”, p.2, Rodale

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• I love no woman, for love is a serious business, not a jest.

  Marie de France

  Love Is, Jest, Seriousness

  Marie de France (2015). “Medieval Lays and Legends of Marie de France”, p.125, Xist Publishing

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• To devote yourself to the creation and enjoyment of beauty, then, can be a serious business-not always necessarily a means of escaping reality, but sometimes a means of holding on to the real when everything is flaking away into... rhetoric and plot.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Real, Mean, Escaping

  Elizabeth Gilbert (2009). “Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything”, p.120, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• Good design is serious business.

  Alan G. Lafley

  Design, Serious, Good Design

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• I knew nothing about farce until I read Puce a l'Oreille, and had no idea what a deadly serious business it is.

  John Mortimer

  Funny, Humor, Ideas

  John Mortimer (2010). “CLINGING TO THE WRECKAGE”, p.241, Penguin UK

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• The thing about being on the majors, from the beginning, going into this, I was like, "I'm not going to be treated like a factory," because that's never the way it was done before. You're talking about a major label, we're talking about serious business; you're not an artist anymore, you're a business, you have to work in terms of product, you have to release a product, and I don't really think that way at all.

  Beth Ditto

  Thinking, Artist, Talking

  "Beth Ditto of Gossip". Interview with Genevieve Koski, www.avclub.com. April 16, 2008.

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• The perfect state, the summum bonum, is Play. In play, life expresses itself in its fullness. God's life is play. Adam fell when his play became serious business .

  Jakob Bohme

  Play, Perfect, Life Is

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• British fashion is a serious business. The British fashion industry is worth £21bn to the U.K. economy and employs 819,000 people across the country.

  Natalie Massenet

  Country, Fashion, People

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• There is no mission, nor interest to convert, and yet I believe that if this state of consciousness could become more universal, the pretentious nonsense which passes for the serious business of the world would dissolve in laughter. We should see at once that the high ideals for which we are killing and regimenting each other are empty and abstract substiutes for the unheeded miracles that surround us - not only in the obvious wonders of nature but also in the overwhelming uncanny fact of mere existence.

  Alan Watts

  Laughter, Believe, Miracle

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• Let us settle down to the serious business of getting drunk.

  Poul Anderson

  Drunk, Settling, Serious

  Poul Anderson (2015). “Fire Time”, p.27, Open Road Media

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• The arts of speech are rhetoric and poetry. Rhetoric is the art of transacting a serious business of the understanding as if it were a free play of the imagination; poetry that of conducting a free play of the imagination as if it were a serious business of the understanding.

  Immanuel Kant

  Art, Play, Imagination

  Immanuel Kant (2013). “Kant's Critiques”, p.691, Simon and Schuster

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• Comedy is a serious business. It's frustrating when I can't find the right thing that makes the crew laugh. If I don't make them laugh, I get very disappointed in myself. You don't really have a live audience, so you just depend on the crew to let you know if you're doing something funny.

  Allison Janney

  Laughing, Serious, Comedy

  "Allison Janney Interview MR. SUNSHINE". Interview with Christina Radish, collider.com. February 9, 2011.

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• In fact, I was welcomed. There were movie stars and rock stars. I became a pot star. I glorified in that. And of course as time wore on the business began to expand and grow. It went from more or less a college fun thing to a serious business. As the money grew, the power grew.

  George Jung

  Stars, Fun, College

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• We few, we happy few, we band of brothers - joined in the serious business of keeping our food, shelter, clothing and loved ones from combining with oxygen.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Brother, Oxygen, Band

  "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater". Book by Kurt Vonnegut, 1965.

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• This 'oh let's hug it out' without taking any responsibility is exactly the problem. ... We are not silly irrational little girls. We are running a serious business with investments from the biggest VCs in the Valley.

  Sarah Lacy

  Girl, Running, Silly

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• My conception of the audience is of a public each member of which is carrying about with him what he thinks is an anxiety, or a hope, or a preoccupation which is his alone and isolates him from mankind and in this respect at least the function of a play is to reveal him to himself so that he may touch others by virtue of the revelation of his mutuality with them. If only for this reason I regard the theater as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone.

  Arthur Miller

  Business, Men, Thinking

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• Comedy is a serious business. A serious business with only one purpose--to make people laugh.

  W. C. Fields

  Business, People, Laughing

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• Joy is the serious business of heaven. Our merriment must be between people who take each other seriously.

  C. S. Lewis

  People, Joy, Heaven

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• Writing is not a serious business. It’s a joy and a celebration. You should be having fun with it.

  Ray Bradbury

  Fun, Writing, Joy

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