David Lange Quotes

You know, I hate to give advice because my life has been so odd that almost nothing that's happened to me can apply.

Life is always surprising to me. When you think it's going to get dull, it never really does.

History asks us to imagine ourselves in a period, but it's a very different situation when you're in that period and faced with those situations.

A lot of folks feel like my brother and me or other politicians chart out their careers from Day 1 until the end. I've never been like that.

Real life is crazier than fiction.

What's crazy about my life is that the biggest things that have happened just happen.

History is not, of course, a cookbook offering pretested recipes. It teaches by analogy, not by maxims. It can illuminate the consequences of actions in comparable situations, yet each generation must discover for itself what situations are in fact comparable.

Biography is history seen through the prism of a person.

What happened? How did I get here? How could I have known that my choices mattered?

making a decision was only the beginning of things. When someone makes a decision, he is really diving into a strong current that will carry him to places he had never dreamed of when he first made the decision.

My experience came before most of you were born. My school was a state school in Leeds and the headmaster usually sent students to Leeds University but he didn't normally send them to Oxford or Cambridge. But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge. So, half a dozen of us tried - not all of us in history - and we all eventually got in. So, to that extent, it [The History Boys] comes out of my own experience.

I never thought I would write an autobiography, probably because my first novel, Go Now, is really all drawn from my life, even though it's more about the psychology going on.

All in all I learned a lesson from it though. You never see it coming you just get to see it go.

My father, Charles Seeger, got me into the Communist movement. He backed out around '38. I drifted out in the 50's.

Music helps us understand where we have come from but, more importantly, what has happened to us.

I'm writing my biography. It's my business. This is what happened in my life, and I'm writing about it.

I was with Essien Udom in Nigeria.

The wise form right judgment of the present from what is past.

No one can understand history without continually relating the long periods which are constantly mentioned to the experiences of our own short lives.

I soon found I could not talk about that in a vacuum without understanding the historical, cultural, political context, and giving it some legacy and some roots, and so then it just started to have tentacles that just spread out in all these places, and already a vicious project became pretty overwhelming in scope, and so it was a lot of diligent, day-to-day fighting with the footage, trying to get it down to a place where it was manageable and emotional.

Right away, I knew I didn't want to have that look of other guys with long hair and bell-bottom pants, because everybody else had that look. I kind of adopted my boarding-school look, which made me stand out. Then the next thing you know, the first song on my first record is a song called "School Days." It's about going to the boarding school I went to. So then I just started to write about myself. The very first song I ever wrote was about a guy I met in a boatyard that we were working in. So I've always had this thing about sticking to more or less what I knew.

You'd only write what you know and what you know is what you do and the people you know. So you'd write about them or the people you have met casually. It's part of your life.

Anything can happen in one day.

You must know that in any moment a decision you make can change the course of your life forever, the very next person who you stand behind in line or sit next to on an aeroplane, the very next phone call you make or receive, the very next movie you see or book you read or page you turn could be the one single thing that causes the floodgates to open, and all of the things that you've been waiting for to fall into place.

I've never written an autobiographical novel in my life. I've never touched upon my life. I've never written a single scene that I can say took place.