Famous Quotes & Sayings

Charles Caleb Colton

As in the game of billiards, the balls are constantly producing effects from mere chance, which the most skillful player could neither execute nor foresee, but which, when they do happen, serve mainly to teach him how much he has still to learn; so it is in the most profound and complicated game of politics and diplomacy. In both cases, we can only regulate our play by what we have seen, rather than by what we have hoped; and by what we have experienced, rather than by what we have expected.

Charles Spurgeon

It needs more skill than I can tell To play the second fiddle well.

Alan Watts

To play so as to be relaxed and refreshed for work is not to play, and no work is well and finely done unless it, too, is a form of play.

Alan Watts

You must not be afraid of playing wrong notes. Just forget it, play it wrong! But play!

Alan Rosenberg

Fair play doesn't pertain in bargaining. What matters there is leverage.

Alan Pardew

It's important that top clubs don't lose sight of the fact that it's the English Premier League and English players should be involved.

Alan Rickman

Who I am gets in the way of people looking innocently at the parts I play.

Alan Rickman

I never expected to have any kind of film career, to be honest. It was all a bit of a surprise. But I was in a big hit play on Broadway. America, as many people will say, says yes more often than we do. And so I was suddenly surrounded by people saying yes. But I was aware that was 'cause of what I was in. It had a big impact.

Alan Rickman

I don't play villains, I play very interesting people

Charles Dickens

Novelties please less than they impress.

David Shields

My medium is prose, not the novel.

David Mitchell

For me, novels coalesce into being, rather than arrive fully formed.

David Mitchell

I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels.

David Quammen

I used to read only fiction. Now I don't read much, only occasionally, such as a Cormac McCarthy or a Jim Harrison novel.

Edmond de Goncourt

History is a novel that has been lived, a novel is history that could have been.

David Hume

Such is the nature of novelty that where anything pleases it becomes doubly agreeable if new; but if it displeases, it is doubly displeasing on that very account.

Audrey Tautou

When you decide to adapt some Russian novel, it's like everyone knows about it but nobody has read it.

Carol Shields

This is why I read novels: so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue.

Dan Stevens

I don't know much about my biological background.

Coco Lee

I was bred and raised in a multi-cultural music background.

Beck

Whatever you do has to be commercial and it can't be too distracting - it has to be background music, basically.

Helen Thomas

I'm of Arab background.

J. I. Packer

N.T. Wright foregrounds what the Bible backgrounds, and backgrounds what the Bible foregrounds

Piper Perabo

I was glad to have had some dance background because some of the dances are pretty wild.

Jodie Foster

I've got that Irish thing going on. Lots of Irish in my background.