42 Quotes by Tom McCarthy

It was basically something that was kind of in the back of my mind, that there was a need for, for a long time. One of the things that inspired me to start it was I've been looking around for jobs myself, and I've done study abroad and not had a whole lot of support, and I realized this is the problem a lot of international business students were having as well as me.

It's always a blast. As much as we think we give people a good Christmas, the people give us a better Christmas.

It's an original. I think I got it at Forbes Field, but I can't remember exactly when. I had to dig it out of retirement for today.

It's become more valuable to every film that we do.

Satin Island, like all books, contains hundreds of borrowings, echoes, remixes and straight repetitions. To list them all would take up as much space as the text itself. The critical reader can entertain him- or herself tracking some of them down, if he or she is that way inclined.

Everything, as Peyman said, may be a fiction – but the Future is the biggest shaggy-dog story of all.

Forget family, or ethnic and religious groupings: corporations have supplanted all these as the primary structure of the modern tribe.

Guns aren’t just history’s props and agents: they’re history itself, spinning alternate futures in their chamber, hurling the present from their barrel, casting aside the empty shells of past.

To the anthropologist, as I explained before, it’s generic episodes and phenomena that stand out as significant, not singular ones. To the anthropologist, there’s no such thing as a singular episode, a singular phenomenon – only a set of variations on generic ones; the more generic, therefore, the more pure, the closer to an unvariegated or unscrambled archetype.