This week’s podcast with Malcolm Margolin featured so many great quotes, I don’t want to limit it to the 2 or 3 I put in the show notes for the episode. So here’s a big ol’ compendium of What Malcolm Said:
- “For years I’d been a slave to the in-box. Being out of the loop was a little disconcerting.”
- “What got me into publishing was to attract beautiful women.”
- “On the outside, I can create things I could never create on the inside.”
- “What I’m passing on to people is . . . the capacity to have fun. To have a life that you can build around. Not branding, and not the demands of the marketplace, but what you really think and what you want.”
- “Dressing Indians up to be perfect victims does them a disservice. What I’ve tried to do is get beyond the ‘dress code’.”
- “In some ways I feel regret; the irony is that I was so active in preserving other people’s cultures and languages, but I let mine go.”
- “As Phil Levine said, ‘Why be yourself when with a little bit of effort you can be interesting?'”
- “One of the biggest changes in the course of my life is the growing dominance of salesmanship in everything we do.”
- “Our culture takes knowledge and structures it around the sense of time. We have history. One thing led to another, and that’s causality. . . . We know the history of institutions, of genealogies. The Indians had none of that. Time is flat. Indians structured their knowledge around place.”
- “Their whole world was filled with stories, and the stories talked to one another.”
- “I’m an emotion junkie. If I can go more than a few hours without breaking into tears, it’s a wasted day.”
- “I’m not sure I know anything you couldn’t talk me out of in 5 minutes.”
- “I think if there’s an inscription on my headstone, it should be, ‘He was easy to please.’”
Now go listen to the podcast!
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