Top 50 Alex North Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The devil finds work for idle hands. Bad thoughts find empty heads. So he kept his hands busy and his mind occupied.”

— Alex North

2. “Fear is a problem with film music and films; people want to be conventional, and there’s more commercialism today. If you are not daring in your art, you’re bankrupt.”

— Alex North

3. “My best film composing experience was with Elia Kazan.”

— Alex North

4. “I prefer to write music for family films. I like people.”

— Alex North

5. “Being an old radical, I like films like Spartacus. I could relate to the hero.”

— Alex North

6. “The United States and Turkey are the only two countries that don’t have some kind of subsidy for the Arts. The whole culture in society has made certain films more acceptable. I turned down so many films in the ’60s and ’70s.”

— Alex North

7. “When I decided to go to a country that subsidized music, I went to the Soviet Union for two years.”

— Alex North

8. “Composers today get a TV script on Friday and have to record on Tuesday. It’s just dreadful to impose on gifted talent and expect decent music under these conditions.”

— Alex North

9. “Tomorrow is always a new day, but there’s never any reason to think it will be a better one.”

— Alex North

10. “There were good memories here too. Moments that, looking back on them objectively, had been filled with light. The problem was that what happened later cast such a shadow they were hard to see.”

— Alex North

11. “The devil finds work for idle hands. Bad thoughts find empty heads.”

— Alex North

12. “You know you need to let each other go, but it’s so sad and difficult, and so you don’t until you have to. Until the hurt of keeping someone outweighs the hurt of losing them.”

— Alex North

13. “It always comes back to me for you, doesn’t it? It always ends where it starts.”

— Alex North

14. “Those woods had always seemed alive and dangerous to me. The deeper you went, the more it began to feel as though you were actually staying still – that the illusion of movement was caused by the land rearranging itself around you, like the squares on a chessboard shifting around the pieces.”

— Alex North

15. “It was like a candle flame that I wanted to cup with my hands, blow on gently, and bring to brighter life. But, of course, there was always a danger when you did that. Always a risk you would make it go out instead.”

— Alex North

16. “Jenny had been my first love, and when you’re young you cling to that long past the point when you know it should be over. You know you need to let each other go, but it’s so sad and difficult, and so you don’t until you have to. Until the hurt of keeping someone outweighs the hurt of losing them.”

— Alex North

17. “Perhaps life was just a matter of doing what you thought was best at the time and then living with the consequences as best you could afterward.”

— Alex North

18. “Because that was what parents did, wasn’t it? They wanted to protect their children. They wanted the best lives possible for them. And they expected nothing in return for that.”

— Alex North

19. “And just as our dreams are shaped by our reality, there are times like these when our lives can be changed by the dreams we’ve had.”

— Alex North

20. “Sometimes people want things to be more complicated than they really are.”

— Alex North

21. “The world was full of bad men. Full of bad dreams that didn’t always happen when you were asleep.”

— Alex North

22. “But he could read the whole book of his father now and he knew that none of it had ever been about him. His own book was separate, and always had been. He had only ever needed to be himself, and it had just taken time – too much time – to understand that.”

— Alex North

23. “The butterflies didn’t have a choice, after all. That’s what things do. Even in the toughest of circumstances, they keep living.”

— Alex North

24. “Battles often make more sense from the sky.”

— Alex North

25. “When there was something awful that had to be faced, it was better to face it immediately; as bad as the event might be, it would occur regardless, and at least that way you wouldn’t have to endure the anticipation as well.”

— Alex North

26. “It was an attempt to make an impact on a world that seemed so oblivious to his existence. It stemmed from a desire to be seen. To be noticed. To be loved. Because that was all any child wanted, deep down.”

— Alex North

27. “Because sometimes really bad things happen to us, and we don’t like to think about them, so they get buried really deep in our heads.”

— Alex North

28. “Guilt. Fear. Anger. Once loose, any one of them would charge off, dragging the others along like dogs chained in a pack. And that was no good at all.”

— Alex North

29. “Absence of evidence was not evidence of absence.”

— Alex North

30. “And while she was sad to see me leave, I think she was also happy that I was heading out into the world, escaping the past and moving forward into a different present without even glancing behind me. Because, however painful it might be, that’s what all good parents have to do in the end.”

— Alex North

31. “Courage is not the absence of fear, Pete knew. Courage requires fear.”

— Alex North

32. “It occurred to me that, when my mother died, I would be all that was left of a family I hadn’t known, and for a moment all my adult confidence evaporated and I was left feeling lost and unmoored.”

— Alex North

33. “Asking why was like diving into a black hole. The deeper you went, the less light you found.”

— Alex North

34. “He had loved her as deeply as she loved him, but the gift and receipt of love was a language.”

— Alex North

35. “Why was not necessarily a question that mattered. Motivations, causes, reasons – they almost always turned out to be mundane and disappointing. What explanation could there possibly be for the horror she had seen in the quarry that afternoon that would make sense of it? Asking why was like diving into a black hole. The deeper you went, the less light you found.”

— Alex North

36. “Back home, I turned on the computer, opened up a blank document in Word, and then saved it under the file name “bad ideas.” I always did that to begin with. Acknowledging it was early days took some of the psychological pressure off. And then, since I’d always been of the mind that making coffee didn’t count as procrastination, I went through to the kitchen and started the kettle boiling, then leaned against the counter and stared out of the window at the back garden.”

— Alex North

37. “Back then, it felt like my entire life was constrained and controlled by the adults around me, and yet none of them appeared to have noticed the black flower rotting in the middle of the yard. Or else they had decided it was easier to leave it alone – that the grass it was poisoning didn’t matter.”

— Alex North

38. “When I thought of my mother, it was always as a presence – a role, almost – and it was strange to be faced with a truth that should have been obvious, that she had been someone with her own dreams and aspirations, who had felt the same as I had, and who had once had a life that existed entirely outside of her relationship to me.”

— Alex North

39. “Adrenaline was a poison; if you didn’t use it up, it used you instead.”

— Alex North

40. “She remembered the desire to escape from it all – to be anywhere apart from where she was, and to find the person she was meant to be, as though the real her were already out there somewhere, and one day they would meet and shake hands.”

— Alex North

41. “There were always so many reasons to drink, though. Only ever one real reason not to.”

— Alex North

42. “That’s what things do. Even in the toughest of circumstances, they keep living.”

— Alex North

43. “If everyone could see God, how many people would bother going to church?”

— Alex North

44. “Yes. That’s a sensible way of looking at it. People worry too much about the nature of things. Sometimes it’s better just to go with them.”

— Alex North

45. “I liked it when people were impressed with my son; it made me feel proud of him. Stupid to think that way, of course – he was a person in his own right, not some accomplishment of mine – but the feeling was always there, and, if anything, with my father it was stronger than usual. I wasn’t sure why.”

— Alex North

46. “I felt the book was important to her, and I had determined there and then to take care of it. If it was in danger of falling apart, then it wasn’t going to happen on my watch. And I supposed I had done that.”

— Alex North

47. “The only ghosts that existed were in your head. They spoke through you, not to you.”

— Alex North

48. “There were as many paths out of hell as there were people, and the vast majority of them ascended.”

— Alex North

49. “That was the thing about going to sleep. It kind of scrubbed things. Arguments, worries, whatever. You could be scared or upset about something, and you might think sleep was impossible, but at some point it happened, and when you woke up in the morning the feeling was gone for awhile, like a storm passed during the night.”

— Alex North

50. “People together, as people should be. He felt a degree of loneliness at that, but you could find pleasure where you looked for it, even in as solitary a life as his.”

— Alex North