Tom Junod Quotes

Tom Junod

Profession : Journalist

Birth : April 9, 1958

Every artist can make art only from the materials at hand, and many of the child stars who try to mature into artists can make art only from their knowledge - and ours - that they were child stars.

Tom Junod

By turning our culture over to the spectacle of child stars and their growing pains, we simply wind up taking their childishness seriously and ensuring that they don't grow up at all. And neither do we.

Tom Junod

I don't play guitar. I sing. I'm the lead singer, of Cousin Billy. I also play harmonica, after a fashion.

Tom Junod

I wasn't learning to sing because I thought I could; I was learning to sing because I knew I couldn't.

Tom Junod

Now, I'm fully aware that there is only one figure more pitiable, more ludicrous, more inherently ridiculous than a bad singer who keeps on singing, and that's a bad singer who keeps on singing because he has issues.

Tom Junod

That's the first thing you learn when you busk in the New York City subways: you immediately join the ranks of the marginalized, the unhinged prophets, the Christian shouters, the Hare Krishnas, the Jehovah's witnesses, the father-and-daughter kitaro team, the violinists playing for their sickly wives.

Tom Junod

I'd never met Philip Seymour Hoffman, never knew anyone who knew him, never even read a passably revealing magazine profile of him.

Tom Junod

We live in the golden age of character actors - in an age when actors who have done their time in character roles are frequently asked to carry dark movies and complicated television dramas.

Tom Junod

Character actors like Philip Seymour Hoffman and James Gandolfini have found themselves getting more and more leading roles because they are permitted to behave onscreen in ways that George Clooney and Matt Damon never could.

Tom Junod

The great character actors are now the actors whose work has the element of ritual sacrifice once claimed by the DeNiros of the world, as well as the element of danger - the actors who thrill us by going for broke.

Tom Junod

Bob Dylan is either the most public private man in the world or the most private public one. He has a reputation for being silent and reclusive; he is neither.

Tom Junod

And what makes Bob Dylan stories interesting is that the only person who can decide their outcome is Bob Dylan, so you never know how they're going to go.

Tom Junod

Ask people who know him for a description of Bob Dylan outside the prerogatives of fame and the obligations of art, and they have to stop and think; there's just not that much left.

Tom Junod

It sounds lonely being Bob Dylan, because Bob Dylan likes being around other Bob Dylans, and there are not many other Bob Dylans around.

Tom Junod

I'm a suit guy. I like wearing them for the sense of completion they offer. I like buying them for the sense of near permanence - the knowledge that whatever I buy will be part of my life for the next ten years or so.

Tom Junod

The suits are as similar as uniforms, and yet you can tell their individual qualities by how they respond to movement - the good ones ripple like wheat in a field and provide not a show of monotony but rather a spectacle of plenty.

Tom Junod

A lot of people like to say that they have trouble getting gifts. I have trouble giving them. It's not out of a lack of generosity, mind you. My fallback is to go big, no matter what the occasion.

Tom Junod

I am the guilty gift-giver, which means that I am a gift-giver who lacks all sense of proportion.

Tom Junod

Like most people, I like to give what I like to get. Unlike most people, I still like to get what I got in college - books, magazine subscriptions, CDs, T-shirts.

Tom Junod

My ten-year-old daughter loves gifts. She loves to give them and she loves to get them. She loves to give them when she's hurt her parents' feelings, and she loves to get them when her parents have hurt hers.

Tom Junod