Famous Quotes & Sayings

Tom Bissell

My fiction-writing DNA shows in how I think about prose, how I think about the page, how I think nonfiction stories should work. And every piece of nonfiction I write, I want it to have fictional texture.

Christian McKay

It's more difficult playing a real-life person than a fictional character - you can go easy on yourself with a fictional character.

Cary Fukunaga

I began writing fictional stories and little screenplays when I was in fifth grade.

Allan Gurganus

When I grew up, there were locked cabinets in public libraries. You needed parental permission if you were under eighteen. I was let down by the overblown reputations of some hardcore fictional works.

Mark Billingham

More than 100 years after he first appeared, Holmes remains the template for the fictional detective.

Annie Baker

I'm really trying to stop setting my plays in this one fictional town in Vermont.

David Guterson

I was totally absorbed in the real world, the politics, the history, the news, and I just couldn't find my way into the fictional world... When I finally could return to writing the novel, it was in fits and starts.

Bob Woods

The story could be set in some fictional place, but it wasn't. They made it personal. They plopped it down in a specific place. People in a small town take a lot of pride in who they are, and that's not who they are. This isn't New York. And then set it in 1963, right? In 1963, they'd make fun of a man if he wore shorts.

Julia Glass

I'm a fictional monogamist - I can only work on one thing at a time - but each novel starts growing in my head when I'm about midway through the previous novel.

Charles Dickens

I have made up my mind that I must have money, Pa. I feel that I can't beg it, borrow it, or steal it; and so I have resolved that I must marry it.

Charles Dickens

All knives and forks were working away at a rate that was quite alarming; very few words were spoken; and everybody seemed to eat his utmost, in self defence, as if a famine were expected to set in before breakfast-time to-morrow morning, and it had become high time to assert the first law of nature.

Charles Dickens

He would make a lovely corpse.

Charles Dickens

It is an old prerogative of kings to govern everything but their passions.

Charles Dickens

Although a skillful flatterer is a most delightful companion if you have him all to yourself, his taste becomes very doubtful when he takes to complimenting other people.

Charles Dickens

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!

Charles Dickens

If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers.

Charles Caleb Colton

Fame is an undertaker that pays but little attention to the living, but bedizens the dead, furnishes out their funerals, and follows them to the grave

Charles Caleb Colton

Marriage is a feast where the grace is sometimes better than the dinner.

Alan Alda

I've never tried to manipulate my image.

C. Northcote Parkinson

The smaller the function, the greater the management.

Brian Trehearne

The poetry was the man, the man was the poetry.

Benjamin Netanyahu

I'm not naturally manipulative.

David Hume

What would become of history, had we not a dependence on the veracity of the historian, according to the experience, what we have had of mankind?

Arne Glimcher

I've been told I'm a good midcareer manager.

Edward Everett

Ever the characteristic manners of cowardice.

Ed Koch

Whenever I leave Manhattan, I get the bends!

Edward Kennedy

Shamefully we now learn that Saddam's torture chambers reopened under new management, U.S. management.

Charles Caleb Colton

It is astonishing how much more anxious people are to lengthen life than to improve it; and as misers often lose large sums of money in attempting to make more, so do hypochondriacs squander large sums of time in search of nostrums by which they vainly hope they may get more time to squander.

Charles Dickens

A multitude of people and yet solitude.

Charles Dickens

My faith in the people governing is, on the whole, infinitesimal; my faith in the people governed is, on the whole, illimitable.

Charles Dickens

Others had been a little wild, which was not to be wondered at, and not very blamable; but, he had made a lamentation and uproar which it was dangerous for the people to hear, as there is always contagion in weakness and selfishness.

Charles Dickens

Mrs. Boffin and me, ma'am, are plain people, and we don't want to pretend to anything, nor yet to go round and round at anything because there's always a straight way to everything.

Charles Dickens

Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and some people do the same by their religion.

Charles Dickens

I have heard it said that as we keep our birthdays when we are alive, so the ghosts of dead people, who are not easy in their graves, keep the day they died upon.

Charles Dickens

Some people are nobody's enemies but their own

Charles Soule

Superman/Wonder Woman, people expected, I guess, a lot of romance, or maybe something that wasnt emotionally deep. Who knows?

Charles Dickens

There is something in sickness that breaks down the pride of manhood.

Charles Caleb Colton

There is this paradox in pride - it makes some men ridiculous, but prevents others from becoming so.

Charles Caleb Colton

Pride requires very costly food-its keeper's happiness.

Charles Caleb Colton

Pride, like the magnet, constantly points to one object, self; but, unlike the magnet, it has no attractive pole, but at all points repels.

Charles Caleb Colton

Whenever we find ourselves more inclined to persecute than to persuade, we may then be certain that our zeal has more of pride in it than of charity.

Charles Caleb Colton

Pedantry prides herself on being wrong by rules; while common sense is contented to be right without them.

Charles Caleb Colton

The most ridiculous of all animals is a proud priest; he cannot use his own tools without cutting his own fingers.

Charles Caleb Colton

Pride differs in many things from vanity, and by gradations that never blend, although they may be somewhat indistinguishable. Pride may perhaps be termed a too high opinion of ourselves founded on the overrating of certain qualities that we do actually possess; whereas vanity is more easily satisfied, and can extract a feeling of self-complacency from qualifications that are imaginary.

Charles Caleb Colton

Many ... begin to make converts from motives of charity, but continue to do so from motives of pride. ... Charity is contented with exhortation and example, but pride is not to be so easily satisfied. ... Whenever we find ourselves more inclined to persecute than persuade, we may then be certain that our zeal has more of pride in it than of charity.

Chris Alexander

The marginal tax rate for high income earners is going up. Small businesses are no longer enjoying some of the exemption from payroll tax. Now there will be carbon taxes.

David Suzuki

Despite the international scientific community's consensus on climate change, a small number of critics continue to deny that climate change exists or that humans are causing it. Widely known as climate change "skeptics" or "deniers," these individuals are generally not climate scientists and do not debate the science with the climate scientists...

Cary Grant

It takes 500 small details to add up to one favorable impression.

Ai Weiwei

A small act is worth a million thoughts.

Barry Diller

I've not conducted my life in the service of smallness.

Dieter F. Uchtdorf

Often small acts of service are all that is required to lift and bless another.

Diana Gabaldon

There was a feeling, not sudden, but complete, as though I had been given a small object to hold unseen in my hands. Precious as opal, smooth as jade, weighty as a river stone, more fragile than a bird's egg. Infinitely still, live as the root of Creation. Not a gift, but a trust. Fiercely to cherish, softly to guard. The words spoke themselves and disappeared into the groined shadows of the roof.

Bob Harper

It's the fact that no matter how bad it's gotten, the body wants to be healthy. The body wants to bounce back. When you do these changes, you do these small changes every single day, and you trust the process of what you're doing. You really do make lasting changes onto your body.

Nikki Sixx

When we were younger, you know, small stuff was small stuff. But we turned it into big stuff. It's just part of being young.

Michael Robinet

When the new vehicles arrive, you don't want too many of the old ones on the lot. I see this as a specific case, not a wide-ranging trend.

Todd Phillips

When I'm writing, I'm writing for a particular actor. When a lot of writers are writing, they're writing an idea. So they're not really writing in a specific voice.

Gustavo Torres

We are going to target them in a specific way.

Brendan Coyle

By the time you've been single for quite a long time, you can get quite specific about what you can and can't put up with.

Walter Salles

I'm much more interested in living specific experiences in films.

Neil Levine

We don't have any specific allocation for it yet.

Sara Zarr

Readers want a story, not a pattern. It's the specifics of a story that make it really ping our various reader radars.

David Gilmour

I don't like to get too specific about lyrics. It places limitations on them, and spoils the listeners' interpretation.

Chris Benz

I have specific playlists for arrivals in different cities. Tokyo skews new wave, Paris more jazz, and New York is Top 40.

Alan Rickman

Los Angeles is not a town full of airheads. There's a great deal of wonderful energy there.

Charles Kuralt

You know, most reporters can't go back to the towns they wrote stories about. I never wrote that kind of story.

Beau Bridges

As an actor, I travel around a lot and live in a lot of hotels, and many times I've been in a town where the only entertainment to be had is what you find in the hotel bar or lobby.

Ben Bernanke

I come from Main Street, from a small town that's really depressed.

Amanda Walker

With no students, the town is pretty quiet.

Hannah Baldwin

We're just a little town that did things that were unheard of at the time.

Barbara Kingsolver

It's tough to break yourself as news to a town that already knows you.

Charles Bukowski

I broke that town in half like a wooden match.

Edward Abbey

When the biggest, richest, glassiest buildings in town are the banks, you know that town's in trouble.

Kim Shaw

I probably wore out my VHS copy of 'Office Space.'

Iris Apfel

I still have the dress I wore on the first date with my husband, which was more than 66 years ago. I still have it, and it still fits.

Pat Sullivan

I think we wore them down with our depth.

Gabrielle Castro

Definitely. They wore us out. We don't go too deep.

Rudy Gay

We kind of wore them down with our defense.

Bob Hill

I don't think we could have done much more than we did. I thought they just wore us out with their depth.

Bob Motzko

They wore us down. They just wore us down physically. Our defensemen were just pooped at the end.