"Changi became my university instead of my prison. ... Among the inmates there were experts in all walks of life - the high and the low roads. I studied and absorbed everything I could from physics to counterfeiting, but most of all I learned the art of surviving."

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Source : "James Clavell, Best-Selling Storyteller of Far Eastern Epics, Is Dead at 69" by William Grimes, www.nytimes.com. September 8, 1994.

James Clavell

#Art Quotes #Experts Quotes #Inmates Quotes

“You can't cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.”
“People love America. Sometimes they don't like the decisions made by America, but I don't think you want a president who tries to become popular and does the wrong thing.”
“The strange thing about television is that it doesn't tell you everything.”

Source : "Fictional character: Thomas Jerome Newton". "The Man Who Fell to Earth", www.imdb.com. March 18, 1976.
“Expressions of sharp and even violent criticism of religion and the church have been welcomed, for they usually imply sincerity of thought. If caustic criticism of religious institutions and practices is irreligious, then Amos, Isaiah, and Jesus were very irreligious men. In fact, that is exactly what many of their contemporaries took them to be.”

Source : "The Questing Spirit: Religion in the Literature of Our Time". Book by Halford Luccock, p. 42, 1947.
“To die should be the most interesting journey of all the journeys a person can take.”
“Once you lose attachment to how you want things to be because you realize you don't control anything, there's a curiously liberating aspect of that. I've always been a control freak, I've always felt that if I try hard enough, everyone I love will be kept safe and everything will be okay. Being shown, in such brutal terms, that that's simply not the way it works, in someways, it messed me up. I've been through hell, but on another level, if you pile up so much tragedy, it either destroys you, or you just start laughing about it. Because at the end of the day, no one gets out alive.”
“Morality [or ethics] is not a subject; it is a life put to the test in dozens of moments.”
“Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.”

Source : Henry James (2016). “The Daily Henry James: A Year of Quotes from the Work of the Master”, p.172, University of Chicago Press

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