John Cooper Clarke Quotes

I don't care to dress up except when it is necessary or good for my business.

I'm probably not your typical business person in many ways. I don't wear a suit. I don't carry a briefcase. I don't wear a tie. I'm fairly casual. I haven't got a big office, and it's in a very ordinary part of town. I'd much prefer to downplay than impress.

My women students openly admit that they dress for interviews like dates, hoping to look their best: makeup, high heels, a well-fitting suit that shows off their figure. And I always tell them to make sure to wear a shirt under the suit jacket. Form fitting, yes. Cleavage, no.

A night-cap deck'd his brows instead of bay,- A cap by night, a stocking all the day.

If you wear a suit, you can talk to anybody.

Broken Window Theory: Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside. Or consider a sidewalk. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of trash from take-out restaurants there or even break into cars.

I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and threw them out the window in disgust.

The immersive ugliness of our everyday environments in America is entropy made visible.

We were on our way to the twentieth floor, sharing the elevator with two suits that had men inside them.

It is bad to be poor. I shall go to the wall for bread and meat, if I neglect my business this year as well as last.

I don't feel like you should promote personally that you dress nicely.

Since I've had a career, my hair has been more or less professional.

Houses, like people, are apt to become rather eccentric if left too much on their own; this house was the architectural equivalent of an old gentleman in a worn dressing-gown and torn slippers, who got up and went to bed at odd times of day, and who kept up a continual conversation with friends no one else could see.

I grew up in a school system . . . where nobody understood the meaning of learning disorder. In the West Indies, I was constantly being physically abused because the whipping of students was permitted.

We were broke in a way that only kids can be broke. Our toes were black with dye from wearing boots that weren't waterproof. We had infected ear lobes and green rings around our fingers from cheap jewelry. No one ever even had a chocolate bar.

I have a garden of my own, But so with roses overgrown, And lilies, that you would it guess To be a little wilderness.

Some of the biggest bores I've ever known are men who have been highly successful in business, particularly self-made heads of big companies. Before the first olive has settled into the first martini, they pour the stories of their lives into the nearest and sometimes the remotest ears capturable.... These men have indeed paid the price of success. To rise to the top of a big company often takes a totality of effort, concentration and dedication. Others, too, have to pay part of the price. Wife and children are out of mind even when in sight.

With boys you always know where you stand. Right in the path of a hurricane. It's all there. The fruit flies hovering over their waste can, the hamster trying to escape to cleaner air, the bedrooms decorated in Early Bus Station Restroom.

A professor I had in college used to tell me that if someone won’t listen to what you have to say because you’re not wearing a tie, then put on a tie, ’cause what you have to say is more important than not wearing a tie. He was right.

It's better to look important than sexy.

On the fourth day of telecommuting, I realized that clothes are totally unnecessary.

There was not one straight floor from the foundation to the roof; the ceilings were so fantastically clouded by smoke and dust, that old women might have told fortunes in them better than in grouts of tea.

And below the heimongmong, all along the ground, were weeds already spilling out over the edges, running wild in every direction.

There is a dysfunctional strangeness to Los Angeles that doesn't exist in any other western city. The roads are crumbling, no-one knows what they're doing, the city government barely works.

It cannot be when the root is neglected that what springs from it will be well ordered.