Quote

You know, in the suburbs, most people believe in gravity, but they don't have much of a sense of humor.

Paul Laffoley

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Paul Laffoley
Age: 80 †
Born: 1935
Born: August 14
Died: 2015
Died: November 16
Architect
Artist
Diarist
Inventor
Cambridge
Massachusetts
Paul George
Jr. Laffoley
Much
Believe
People
Suburbs
Gravity
Humor
Sense

More quotes by Paul Laffoley

Image
[My father] was also a lawyer in his bank and specialized in tax law. He would have to do the tax returns for all the Harvard profs because they were buffaloed by that kind of reasoning. Professors in the economics department, even they knew nothing about it.
Paul Laffoley
Image
[Buckminster Fuller] always liked to say that he got kicked out of Harvard three times. Mostly you only got kicked out once, but he kept coming back.
Paul Laffoley
Image
I always had a sense of liking diagrams, from the time I was studying architecture. Architecture is built diagrams, basically.
Paul Laffoley
Image
To have that radical a mind in that bourgeois-looking body was really hard for a lot of people to take, because, when my mother would want to have people over she'd tell [my father], Don't start with the gravity stuff. And then he would invariably do this and the guests would look at each other and say, Well, I think it's time to go now.
Paul Laffoley
Image
[My father] was always upset that my mother didn't want to live in New York. Because he said he wanted to live in a hotel and not have to mow the lawn and all that. In other words, he never liked sports clothes, he always liked to be dressed up formally, 24/7. And he drove big cars and, you know, just loved to act the banker.
Paul Laffoley
Image
I think [Nikola Tesla] was always like that. And so it was inevitable that he would be an inventor. Because it was so easy for him to think fourth-dimensionally, dynamically. It wasn't just a static thing with him. In other words, it isn't the way an architect thinks, which is essentially static.
Paul Laffoley
Image
I'd had the experience with Giuseppe Conti, I said, My God, that's my movie! I kept seeing [The Day the Earth Stood Still] everywhere I could. Then finally, when VHS and DVDs came out, I got that. And I keep watching it all the time.
Paul Laffoley
Image
When I was in New York working for [Frederick] Kiesler, at night I listened to Jean Shephard who lasted from 1957 until 1976 and then went off the air. But also I was listening to Long John Nebel. Now, Long John was what Art Bell and George Noory do now.
Paul Laffoley
Image
It was on Long John's show that I heard Orfeo Angelucci being interviewed. In other words, the whole thing about the green globes on the top of a car bumper and the voice coming out, you know, and then this beautiful lady.... So he went through the whole number, what you read in his book, that kind of stuff. A whole raft of things.
Paul Laffoley
Image
[Nikola Tesla] said he had no interest in the spiritual. He didn't believe in telepathy, didn't believe in any of that stuff, didn't believe in any religion, and he just thought all these people were being superstitious and wanted them to go away. And in that way he was very close to H.P. Lovecraft, who was almost a believing atheist.
Paul Laffoley
Image
When I was at Brown. In other words, I'd heard about [H.P. Lovecraft], but I didn't pay that much attention till I happened to go to a meeting about it. And then I got just totally turned on.
Paul Laffoley
Image
I first heard of [Orfeo Angelucci] from Giuseppe Conti who gave me some books by him.
Paul Laffoley
Image
You know, people who can draw get upset when people who can't start telling them what to do!
Paul Laffoley
Image
At one time in the mid-'70s I became the president of the Boston-Cambridge chapter of the World Future Society. Because I'd been in my studio by myself since 1968 on up. And the thing is that my social life consisted of being involved in organizations like that. I would get people to come and speak, and speak myself and that kind of stuff.
Paul Laffoley
Image
I think [H.P. Lovecraft] recognized what he was dealing with, he was dealing with demons. And he was dealing with creatures that're suffering. There's no way out of this suffering.
Paul Laffoley
Image
Stephen Hawking won [Babson Institute competition ] one year with his black hole stuff. It's keeping an open mind on whether gravity exists or not. I think my father believed this because ... when the wind blew on him, he'd get angry, because it was something he couldn't control.
Paul Laffoley
Image
I would be constantly brought up on the carpet by these teachers who were brought up with Abstract Expressionism, saying, You're too uptight, you're not expressing yourself, why don't you feel freer? I said, Well, I don't like that stuff. It means nothing to me.
Paul Laffoley
Image
We would go on retreats to Florence. The people in the planning team got to be good friends and so we did things like, we'd all go over to the Fort Belvedere in Florence and take that thing over. Because it's up for grabs, you can rent it. And then have New Age meetings and all that kind of stuff. [Buckminster] Fuller loved to go there.
Paul Laffoley
Image
Now, we know this is what [H.P.] Lovecraft was into. Because he kept talking about how he wasn't interested in religion. In a heaven state there is no religion, meaning that you're seeing the whole thing ... I mean, to worship something means that it's something beyond you, right? In other words, it's not being revealed to you.
Paul Laffoley
Image
My father knew all about this stuff [C.W. Leadbeater]. I owe a lot of what I'm doing, I think, to him. I'm sort of continuing my father's work.
Paul Laffoley