Halvard Halvorsen’s tumblelog

Art is just things in the world, usually an arrangement of colour and shapes. It’s people who have the feelings and the reactions

Quote by Martin Creed on Art - The Observer

I was a very unpleasant young man. If I met the young Ingmar today I’d say, You’re very talented and I’ll try to help you, but I don’t want anything else to do with you.

Quote on age by Ingmar Bergman

Anyone who says they are influenced by The Beatles, alarm bells start to go off; it means they are going to be completely ordinary.

David Keenan Quote by BBC NEWS | Help! I’m a Beatles hater

Rock journalism is people who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read.

Frank Zappa: Rock journalism is people… - The Quotations Page

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

Quote Details: Arthur Schopenhauer: All truth passes through… - The Quotations Page

Those who claim to forecast the future are lying, even if by chance they are later proved to be right.

Vince Cable/Arab saying on predictions (This is Money)

Science has killed religion, there’s no hope for the future with seven billion of us on the planet, and the only thing you can do is to laugh in the face of it all.

Interview: TC Boyle | Culture | The Guardian

Bill [Nelson] is one of the four artists whose fan club I ever was member of and Bill’s Acquitted by Mirrors (a lot of the original content now available online) was excellent — with free vinyl EPs and a good magazine containing writing and artwork by Bill. The three others (as if you were interested) — Durutti Column’s “subscription” service, John Foxx’s “The Service” (both shortliving failures — but I’ll gladly hand over fifteen quid anytime to keep Vini going) and The Cramps’ Legion of the Cramped (which was brilliantly run from Scotland by Lindsay Hutton).

Me, Ex-member of Legion of the Cramped (acecast 2006 archive).

The act of visiting locations such as diners, smokestack industrial sites, rural villages — locations where time appears to have been frozen many years back — so as to experience relief when one returns back to “the present.”

Historical Slumming - Generation X Dictionary

There are two kinds of economists - those who don’t know the future and those who don’t know they don’t know.

JK Galbraith quote on economists via Times Online

You do not need to be a grammarian to know that you do not fight wars against common nouns but against personal ones. You fight a war against this or that country or enemy. Wars on drugs, wars on poverty, wars on waste - all these things are idle if grandiose ways of describing doomed political ventures.

Quote by Chris Patten - War on drugs etc (Guardian).

Those investors who cling now to cash are betting they can efficiently time their move away from it later. In waiting for the comfort of good news, they are ignoring [ice-hockey player] Wayne Gretzky’s advice: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.”

I don’t like to opine on the stock market, and again I emphasise that I have no idea what the market will do in the short term. Nevertheless, I will follow the lead of a restaurant that opened in an empty bank building and then advertised: “Put your mouth where your money was.”

Today my money and my mouth both say equities.

Warren Buffett: Now’s the time to be greedy when others are fearful - Times Online

This collapse is likely to be profitable for one fund manager who has for decades made a point of sticking to his own fundamental notions of value: the American billionaire Warren Buffett. His great mentor was Benjamin Graham, an influential American investor whose key insight was that, on the stock market, there is a deceptively simple duality. Graham called this the Class One versus the Class Two truth. A Class One Truth is a sober assessment of a company’s objective worth at a point in time: the figure you get after you add up the value of its property, cash and other assets, then subtract its debts. A Class Two Truth, by contrast, is based on external factors such as emotion, fashion and herd instinct: it is ‘true’ only for as long as we continue to believe in it, just as a designer handbag is only worth £5,000 if people think so. When there is a discrepancy between the two types of truth on the stock markets, there is a chance to make money.

Ruth Sutherland: We lost sight of the true worth of things. Now let’s get it back | Comment is free | The Observer

People think I’m an amateur. That’s become a derogatory term, like I don’t know what I’m doing. But the amateur is someone who does things out of love.

Billy Childish and his weird world - Times Online

A house is somewhere to live in. It’s not a source of wealth.

Interview: BBC business editor Robert Peston, ‘face of the credit crunch’ | Media | The Guardian

What is so fascinating about torturing a girl to death or shooting an innocent teenager? What I want to do is recognise the fantasy, take hold of it and take it apart.

Quote by Roberto Saviano (The Observer).

The path to contentment is well signposted but generally points in the opposite direction to where we want to travel. Instead we rush off getting everything we want and then realise we don’t need any of it. A quicker way to contentment is to realise you don’t need any of the things you think you want before spending 40 years trying to acquire them.

Guy Browning: How to … be content (The Guardian)

As Seth Freedman argues, in our haste to find culprits, we are in danger of casting short-sellers as the villains of the piece. But we would do better to see them as unofficial policeman of the market. They contribute to the process financiers call “price discovery” – the way in which markets go about setting the price of goods, services and capital. Short-sellers are looking for situations where prices have risen too high. Their activity helps to limit the occasions on which lazy managements and bad companies are funded.Northern Rock is a good example. The folk who spotted the flaw in the bank’s business model were a handful of hedge funds, such as Lansdowne Partners, which opened its short position years before the Rock’s fall and continued to back its judgment as the share price soared. Lansdowne deserved its eventual payday. If more investors had shared its opinion earlier, maybe the market would never have supported such a dumb financial experiment like the Rock.

Nils Pratley: Short-sellers - the market’s unofficial policemen (Guardian).

When I was a Booker judge myself a few years ago, I had to study his contender, Shalimar the Clown, closely. Did I, on finally giving one of his novels full attention, find myself converted? ‘Fraid not. I slogged through, a militant opponent of every page. I found the overloaded sentences and overbearing manner insufferable. And I didn’t believe a word of it, which never helps.

Now it seems that I have been proved an ass once more, by popular vote, no less. But this Booker of Bookers was an odd affair. A panel of judges first selected a shortlist of six, leaving off such genuinely popular titles as The Life of Pi and The Remains of the Day. Then just that six were put to the vote. Even with online voting and considerable publicity, only 7,800 people bothered to choose the inevitable winner. So, not that popular a vote.

Yet another award - but I still can’t read Rushdie (Sexton, Evening Standard)

Freed from the demands of advertising and the moral and marketing qualms of the networks, content is once again king, and the result is some of the best storytelling of our time.

The Wire, The Shield and Dexter: America’s national theatre - Times