87+ Paul Laffoley Quotes On Art, Education And World

Paul Laffoley is an American film actress who has appeared in numerous films and television series. She is best known for her roles in the films The Departed, The Fighter, and The Town. She has also appeared in television series such as Law & Order: SVU and Grey's Anatomy. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Paul Laffoley on art, leadership, education.

Top 10 Paul Laffoley Quotes

1. I could do Superman, the Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, this kind of stuff [at school]. And kids would give me their lunch money to have these things.
2. You know, in the suburbs, most people believe in gravity, but they don't have much of a sense of humor.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. In other words, [ H.P. Lovecraft] was areligious, asexual, neurasthenic, he just didn't want to react to the world. Like Virginia Woolf, who considered religion the ultimate obscenity.
6. [Nikola Tesla] was thinking of parts actually moving, like exchanging positions in space through time. This would go over here, then that would go over there, and then something else would happen.
7. Carl Jung put [Orfeo Angelucci] in his last book [Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1959]. He said Orfeo had made up a new bible.
8. [Nikola Tesla and Leon Theremin] were European gentlemen, very well-mannered, all of the stuff you associate with living in Europe.
9. I thought George Adamski was actually a fraud. Looking at him, I found him repulsive. In other words, he didn't have the wide-eyed, innocent look that Orfeo Angelucci did.
10. I think [H. P. Lovecraft] knew the whole gamut. He just didn't believe any of it! He probably liked to use the esoteric stuff because he knew it would tick people off and freak them out.

Paul Laffoley Short Quotes

• I first heard of [Orfeo Angelucci] from Giuseppe Conti who gave me some books by him.
• I've kind of always done diagrams. It helped me think.
• [Buckminster Fuller] would pretend to be deaf at the right times.
• The Mobius strip is only an analog for the reality of what it is.
• My father said he did have the mathematics of mind physics, or the physics of consciousness.
• Boston is not an avant garde place. It stays literally 15 to 20 years behind New York at all times.
• You know, people who can draw get upset when people who can't start telling them what to do!
• I mean, even New York isn't in any great shape anymore in relation to the rest of the world.

Paul Laffoley Quotes About Art

Long John I think went off the air in about '79 or something, so there was a hiatus. That's why I think Art Bell thought there was a spot to be filled. He was doing exactly the same thing. — Paul Laffoley

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

I did do, well before Pop Art, all the cartoon characters as paintings. — Paul Laffoley

Paul Laffoley Famous Quotes And Sayings

[My father] had this quirky thing of not believing in gravity. And giving me a constant headache about that one. He would say if I showed any interest in gravity, I was becoming a dupe of the system. He could see indications I was beginning to believe in it. — Paul Laffoley

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

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

My father would conclude his dissertations by saying, "Of course, [Albert] Einstein never believed in gravity. It was a distortion of space." And so my father couldn't believe that an attraction at a distance was a reality. — Paul Laffoley

I was always doing paintings. I actually started painting with oil paints when I was four years old. Not crayons, not pencils and that kid of stuff. I'd paint birds. Anything that moved, stuff like that. — Paul Laffoley

[Nikola Tesla] would do it through lucid dreaming. He would, in a sense, dream up the engine, forget about it, come back, and then discover where it was wearing. You know, where the parts were wearing out. Now, that's inner visualization and a half! And that was the secret of why he did so many inventions. — Paul Laffoley

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

It's called "Pickman's Mephitic Models," based on the story [Pickman's Model by H. P. Lovecraft].Certain things about it many people don't realize. Pickman was a real painter who lived between 1888 and 1926. Now, there's a question mark [gesturing toward the writing in the margins of the painting], because Lovecraft claims that he turned into a ghoul. God knows how old he is now. — Paul Laffoley

I think [Theosophical and Masonic books] wasn't that I was inspired so much. I was corroborated by them. — Paul Laffoley

H.P.Lovecraft could've been trying to do a Marx to Hegel, that kind of thing, in other words, turn the thing upside down and crawl around inside it. But, look, the guy was eating poorly, he had like a quart of ice cream a day. He was suffering constantly near the end. He wasn't concerned with his body at all, not the way we're concerned with our bodies nowadays. — Paul Laffoley

While often being called transdisciplinary, theonomous reasoning is actually a first step back to ancient wisdom in which methodological sensation [or what we now know as science] has completely merged with methodological revelation [or totally known mystical knowledge in which every aspect of the occult has been overcome]. A true tradition has no occult or hidden phases left in its process. The creators and the audience are in perfect harmony. — Paul Laffoley

I would say [to my father], "Why don't you actually take some courses in physics instead of saying [you are not believing in gravity]?" But he would never do it. Businessmen for some reason or other, think, because they're successful in a single direction, that they know everything. You know what I mean? You ever meet people like that? — Paul Laffoley

I started with "Pickman's Model," because it was about Boston. I mean, what I loved about [H. P. Lovecraft], at first is his sense of scholarship of an area, setting an environment, enlivening it. I think that's one of the secrets of writing. — Paul Laffoley

The tetrahedron was [ Buckminster Fuller's] big thing. He'd talk about it in the same way Plato talked about angles. — Paul Laffoley

I like Colin Wilson, mainly because he never went to school. When you don't go to school you can say anything you want like that and not have to worry. — Paul Laffoley

I actually challenged The Theosophical Society on their concept of planes of reality. I said, "What you're doing is, you're stacking two-dimensional surfaces in three-space. And you are not going into any other dimensions at all." And they were furious, because they thought I was attacking Madame [Elena] Blavatsky. — Paul Laffoley

I really wanted to study with Bruce Goff [one of the masters of "organic architecture"] at the University of Oklahoma. — Paul Laffoley

I always had a sense of liking diagrams, from the time I was studying architecture. Architecture is built diagrams, basically. — Paul Laffoley

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

You know, Mick Jagger's "Sympathy for the Devil." I think it was inspired by that [H.P.Lovecraft stories]. You don't know who's reading what, you know. It just comes out once in a while in the pop culture. — Paul Laffoley

The Babson Institute, which is now an actual university, was started by this guy [my father] who also had a problem with believing in gravity. And so he started the Babson Institute in New Boston, New Hampshire, which then moved to Gloucester. Each year they have a competition of one thousand dollars for one thousand words of an essay on gravity. That's the way they do it. — Paul Laffoley

I was sent to the regular public schools until I had to go to Belmont Hill. Because I wasn't doing anything. The public school was nothing, just a total waste of time. — Paul Laffoley

I met a guy who had the same theory and wrote a book about it. His name is Walter C. Wright Jr. His book is called Gravity Is a Push. I wrote to him and told him about my father, and he said he wished he'd met him. My father died quite a while ago. — Paul Laffoley

I belong to the Lovecraft Society, which meets at the University. They do things like follow in Lovecraft's footsteps, just like he followed in Edgar Allan Poe's footsteps. I mean the actual footfalls, you know, like they're going out looking for sasquatch, this kind of stuff. — Paul Laffoley

The whole thing that Dante [Alighieri] did was summed up in the medieval world. It's like St. Thomas Aquinas, the Summa Theologica. He didn't invent it, he just put it all in one package. You get twelve fat books there sitting in any library. Whereas... I think if Joshi thinks [H.P.] Lovecraft was doing anything like that, just throwing together all this stuff to form a kind of anti-mythology, that's where I would disagree with him. — Paul Laffoley

The whole theory of what Satan is, it's Lucifer, the highest of the seraphim, the bearer of God's light, who at a certain point comes to believe he is what is being revealed to him. — Paul Laffoley

For years [H.P] Lovecraft was defined as an atheist. Well, he wasn't saying anything about what he really was at all. He wasn't even an agnostic. That's exactly what the situation is, in other words, when you enter an eternal realm. You've got to know there is no religion. — Paul Laffoley

[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

At 15 [my father] revolted against his father like any teenager, and said, "I'm out of here! What are you doing to me?" He thought he wouldn't be involved in that kind of stuff for the rest of his life. He just wanted to make money. He was one of those people who took over the family responsibility. His own father was pretty irresponsible with money and borrowed from people all the time. — Paul Laffoley

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

I went to the Mary Lee Burbank School in Belmont. And it was a place where you, like, learned to go to the store? And I was saying, Oh God, I want to learn something else. I wanted to learn to read and write better and do mathematics better. They were very much into Abstract Expressionism and that artsy stuff. And where most kids did what I call meaningless blobs, I could render perfectly. — Paul Laffoley

[My father] was always saying I'd end up like my grandfather. Okay. My grandfather was an architect, I'm an architect. It's true, certain characteristics are similar. — Paul Laffoley

[Buckminster Fuller ] never got past his freshman year [in Harvard], because the guy was an insane womanizer and he did parties every night, never studied anything, never took a note, didn't care about anything and just had a blast. So they said, "We gotta let you go. You get zeros all the time." Today it wouldn't even matter, because they don't care if you can read. — Paul Laffoley

I would say that it's probably impossible for a lot of people to even think what H.P. Lovecraft's theological state was. — Paul Laffoley

From the time of Dante [Alighieri], when you have the Ptolemaic universe, you had God on the outside like a hypersphere, and then in the center you have the Earth, all the seven heavens and layers, and then you have the Mount of Purgatory and Hell right in the center, and here's Satan flapping his wings and he keeps making the lake of Cocytus ice so you can't get out. So, again, where Heaven and Hell are, who the hell knows that now? — Paul Laffoley

Any sort of working drawings are simply diagrams. Architecture encourages your imagination to work that way. — Paul Laffoley

Around the corner [ of the Carnegie Delicatessen] is the Russian Tea Room, which is now out of business. Which is awful. I remember going in there and seeing the ballerinas trotting in there like they were prize horses, with their hair, their sunglasses. Really amazing. They were all White Russians. This is where [Leon] Theremin met a lot of people, and where the KGB eventually picked him up. — Paul Laffoley

[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

I hear some guy teaches a course in diagrammatic thinking now; he's written books on it and stuff like that, and so it was kind of natural for me. Because it was a way in which words naturally fitted into something that's visual. I was always interested in doing that. — Paul Laffoley

Walter C. Wright has a more cogent presentation than my father did about [gravity] being a push. But he had the same basic belief, that the idea of magnetism attracting something was not the reason why the effects of what we call gravity occur. — Paul Laffoley

Anyway, my father became super-responsible. You know, he was the kind of person that absorbs all responsibility in the family, and then everybody else can act like a child in relation to him. — Paul Laffoley

[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

[Buckminster Fuller] was quite a Newtonian in certain ways. But he was an excellent inventor and kept people on their toes. — Paul Laffoley

Buckminster Fuller was down in Pennsylvania, then he'd come up and go to his island in Maine. He wanted to remain a New Englander. He taught from '48 to '49 and '50 at Black Mountain College. That's where he met Kenneth Snelson. Fuller kind of stayed a Yankee right in the New England area. So it was pretty easy to get him to come on over, and we would have lectures at the Harvard Science Center. — Paul Laffoley

[Buckminster Fuller] could do four, five hours straight where some people would leave, eat, get a snooze and come back and he's still going. He was like a fireplug. — Paul Laffoley

[The Theosophical Society] are ideologues in terms of the way they present the material. That's one of the reasons why, when they teach their courses, you only get a smidgen of stuff and you have to keep coming back every week. They won't do an overview. Because they're trying to bypass your conscious critical faculties by leaking the information slowly. — Paul Laffoley

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

When [my father] reached his majority, he was the head of the family. Everybody depended upon him. He went into a very uptight appearance; he would wear Chesterfield coats to work, Homburg hats, really getting into the whole thing. He knew people like Oscar Levant. He loved New York. He wanted to live there. — Paul Laffoley

Forms of energy from nature gave my father trouble. He refused to believe he was going to die. He had these weird delusions. It's amazing. Along with all the great thoughts, he had all this funny stuff. — Paul Laffoley

I was born rather late in [my father's] life, in his mid - 40s. And so what he did up until the time he was 15, I think probably from age 12 to 15, my grandfather made him demonstrate mediumistic powers at the Exeter Street Theater, the first Spiritualist church in the United States. — Paul Laffoley

My father was an extremely brilliant man. I consider him a genius, and so he probably could have joined Mensa. But why? I got in it with a 79 I.Q. and the first day I said, "I'm getting the hell out of here quick!" They're all losers. All they do is talk about their IQ. — Paul Laffoley

Long John would sometimes hold his interviews in the Carnegie Delicatessen, which is the most famous delicatessen in New York up by Carnegie. Let's see, 57th Street, you're down to like 50th Street and 7th Avenue... You'd go in there and everybody would be eating a heart attack on a plate, pastrami, malts, that kind of stuff. But it literally was the place where Woody Allen would go. — Paul Laffoley

[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

[My father] was a banker. He was the president of the Cambridge Trust Company, the head of the trust department, and he taught classes at the Harvard Business School. And he was a member of the Harvard Faculty Club, which I am, too, because what I did is... I have the same name as my father, only Jr. — Paul Laffoley

I think it was because [Nikola] Tesla and [Leon] Theremin were part of what made up the movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still. Klaatu was actually a European among the Americans. And so the person who wrote the story said that Klaatu came from Europa, the fourth moon of Jupiter, which is now being investigated for life. There's water and ice on it and that kind of stuff. — Paul Laffoley

In other words, you've got a journey as the plot, but it has to be in a lively environment, being able to create the mood. If you read "Pickman's Model," in other words, they're winding their way through the Boston Streets and [H.P.] Lovecraft researched what was there. — Paul Laffoley

As a kid, I was getting information in areas that no one else was getting. I think that was one of the reasons my mother didn't want me to go to school too soon. Because I would be beaten to a pulp, you know, if I walked down the street and said there was no such thing as gravity. — Paul Laffoley

I started modeling myself on [ Buckminster Fuller], like with the hair. I reached an age where I sort of, kind of, looked like him a little bit, you know? I thought it was great. — Paul Laffoley

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

Look at all the stuff the Existentialists did. You can start with [Pablo] Picasso, you know, and then Francis Bacon and other guys like that. What they were doing is depicting suffering. And that's exactly what a demon is, he's pretending that he isn't. So he can get more people down there. You know, misery loves company, that's the whole thing. So that's basically the pitch that I'm working on. — Paul Laffoley

I began to analyze the movie [The Day the Earth Stood Still] and said it was really made out of these two characters [Nikola Tesla and Leon Teremin] who were brought together. That made it fascinating to me. And especially the language they made up, that Klaatu speaks. Because it has a Latin word order. It's like medieval Latin, but it had some Navajo phonemes in it and that kind of stuff. — Paul Laffoley

[H.P.Lovecraft] is thrust into some kind of outer space realm, like here [pointing toward the painting in progress]. In other words, he's recognized he's gone through R'lyeh, the Sunken City of R'lyeh, and then Cthulhu, the extraterrestrial, calls his band of worshippers home to recognize him as the anti-christ. This is all in The Necronomicon, something Lovecraft actually did make up. — Paul Laffoley

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

Both [Nikola] Tesla and [Leon] Theremin were preternaturally young. I mean, for a long time Tesla was a young man well into his 70s. And so was Theremin, even though, at the end, he looked pretty old. But he was still doing things that young guys do, beyond the time you'd normally think people should be doing that stuff. — Paul Laffoley

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

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

Life Lessons by Paul Laffoley

1. Paul Laffoley's work teaches us to embrace our creativity and use it to explore new ideas and possibilities.
2. He also encourages us to think outside the box and challenge our preconceived notions of reality.
3. Lastly, his work reminds us to stay open-minded and to never stop learning and growing.