Famous Quotes & Sayings

Joseph Campbell

Whenever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or place. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science and history, mythology is absurd.

Will Rogers

There ain't nothing that breaks up homes, country, and nations like somebody publishing their memoirs.

Karen Abbott

I don't consider 'American Rose' to be a biography so much as a microcosm of 20th-century America, told through Gypsy's tumultuous life - it's 'Horatio Alger meets Tim Burton.'

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Not enough books focus on how a culture responds to radically new ideas or discovery. Especially in the biography genre, they tend to focus on all the sordid details in the life of the person who made the discovery. I find this path to be voyeuristic but not enlightening.

Noel Riley Fitch

Whether in print or other media, a good biography is more than a court record or a stringing together of already familiar sources. It breathes life into the subject.

Brad Grey

Mental illnesses involve biological brain disorders, no matter what Tom Cruise says,

Jamie Cullum

I have a piano in my kitchen. I read a great biography about Tom Waits that said that he had a piano in his kitchen; he had a grand piano in his kitchen. And I thought, 'Well, if Tom Waits has one, then I must.'

Floyd Skloot

For those who turn to literary biography for salacious details, 'Flannery' will disappoint. It is the biography of someone who had very little chance to live in the conventional sense, to experience events.

Robert Gottlieb

There are a few writers whose lives and personalities are so large, so fascinating, that there's no such thing as a boring biography of them - you can read every new one that comes along, good or bad, and be caught up in the story all over again.

Agnes Repplier

People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization.

Agnes Repplier

English civilization rests largely upon tea and cricket, with mighty spurts of enjoyment on Derby Day, and at Newmarket.

Alan Rudolph

You know, our sense of individuality is just the number one target of civilization.

Charles de Gaulle

At the root of our civilization, there is the freedom of each person of thought, of belief, of opinion, of work, of leisure.

Charles Caleb Colton

A semi-civilized state of society, equally removed from the extremes of barbarity and of refinement, seems to be that particular meridian under which all the reciprocities and gratuities of hospitality do most readily flourish and abound. For it so happens that the ease, the luxury, and the abundance of the highest state of civilization, are as productive of selfishness, as the difficulties, the privations, and the sterilities of he lowest.

Bill Reynolds

There are a lot of Civil War guys around that nobody knows where they're buried.

Kemal Saiki

There is a limit on our resources and the priorities we have are protecting civilians and supporting the transitional process.

Sue Monk Kidd

When I wrote 'The Secret Life of Bees,' I was writing about civil rights.

Sean MacBride

It is a rule of international law that weapons and methods of warfare which do not discriminate between combatants and civilians should never be used.

Marcus Giles

We want to prove that we're going to be someone to deal with in this division.

Richard Costigan

We have no idea until the federal regulations are promulgated how, in fact, they will deal with California.

Charles Sumner

We have never dealt with the dollars we are dealing with today,

John Howard

What the show deals with is how difficult it can be. It involves people from every walk of life and they all take an enormous risk.

Art Hogan

When you see a deal of this size, obviously (Washington Mutual) is still acquirable,

Rich Cleveland

When you score five points in a quarter, even when they score only 10, it's hard to deal with. The guys lost some confidence.

Billy Duffy

When you're trying to sell something -- and we took a fairly big record deal when they were still going around -- we felt a lot of pressure to live up to that and perform. I think that at this point, we're a lot happier just playing live music. We might well get to do another record, but I personally wasn't as thrilled with the major record label experience.

Mark Hamilton

We want seminars that will really engage these delegates in discussions about the issues that must have been dealt with at the Constitutional Conference,

Eddie Jordan

We wanted to win this game in the worst way. Its a tough, tough loss, but we have to deal with it and get ready for Miami tomorrow night.

Don Novello

I wrote that letter, and the one to Nixon. And I wrote more letters, and I thought it might be a magazine article. At that time I sent it to Esquire and Playboy, but anyway, I kept writing, and all of sudden I had enough and thought, well maybe it is a book.

Doug MacGregor

We have no interest in a name on a masthead. With any partnership, you want the whole to be greater than the sum of the parts.

Bill Buckner

We want it to be a great destination year-round, make it a place to go play and stay.

Dusty Baker

We were trying everything to get him his victory. It was a great run by Greg. The guys wanted to win for him, and we left him in in the ninth to have that opportunity.

Alan Ladd

I've always had a great respect for the picture business. It's been good to me

Charlie Chaplin

There is greatness in everyone.

Charles Sumner

The true greatness of nations is in those qualities which constitute the greatness of the individual.

Charles de Gaulle

Greatness is a road leading towards the unknown.

Charles de Gaulle

France cannot be France without greatness.

Charles Caleb Colton

Great men, like comets, are eccentric in their courses, and formed to do extensive good by modes unintelligible to vulgar minds.

Lesley Nicol

When you look back, I think things are as they are meant to be. Timing is very important.

Maajid Nawaz

Satire is, by definition, offensive. It is meant to make us feel uncomfortable. It is meant to make us scratch our heads, think, do a double-take, and then think again.

Martin Jacques

We all know what is meant by the term 'international community,' don't we? It's the West, of course, nothing more, nothing less. Using the term 'international community' is a way of dignifying the West, of globalising it, of making it sound more respectable, more neutral and high-faluting.

Dee Romine

She has meant so much to our program. She is the ultimate team player and didn't shy away from taking the big shots.

Pat Summitt

She reached out at a time that meant a lot to me.

Jennifer Rizzotti

She willed us not just to win, but to play like this. Erika has meant everything to this team all weekend and all season long.

Jude Law

What's it all about, Alfie? /Is it just for the moment we live? /What's it all about when you sort it out, Alfie? /Are we meant to take more than we give or are we meant to be kind?

Sara Hunter

On paper, I'm sure everyone thinks this year has been terrible. But our seniors meant so much to this team. It's so sad to see them go. We just need to keep building.

Steve Almond

I was saddled with this strange name, which meant that I was constantly, constantly, being serenaded with the Sometimes you feel like a nut Almond Joy/Mounds jingle.

David Walker

We have to get some movement on it shortly,

Hans Mosesmann

We've seen the same movement (as Philips). We think this quarter is the bottom.

Malik Peiris

The real culprits who are doing the movement you probably don't see. They're probably healthy. Obviously, if they're sick, they would not be able to migrate.

Frank Newport

There are debates, there are ads, and all that stuff so you're going to have movements up and down.

Eckhart Tolle

When there's somebody there who is transparent enough so that the stillness comes through unhindered, there's a reciprocal movement in you because the presence of stillness suddenly recognizes itself.

Brian Ferneyhough

In any case, the fewer boundaries that exist hindering free movement between all forms of articulate human cognition, the better.

C. L. R. James

I had a national and international reputation. I had written the history and articles. So I brought to the Trotskyist movement some international reputation.

Bryan Clay

I'm excited to be a part of the Olympic movement again.

Carl Jung

Hitler's movement is near to Mohammedanism.

Carre Otis

Eating disorders, body dysmorphia and a general dissatisfaction with one's life and body seems to ail too many young people.

Carol Roth

Most people end up owning a business by accident. Therefore, they don't usually have a thought process and a strategic plan in place.

Carol Kane

I don't feel that I have any great grasp of technique that I should pass along to people.

Carol Kane

That's when the great stuff happens, when you're not checking yourself all the time, being critical of yourself and what other people are doing.

Carol Leifer

They're all sources of material. What I love about what I do, the more you talk about your life, there are so many people who have similar experiences.

Carol Shields

I'm concerned about the unknowability of other people.

Carol Moseley Braun

All I really want to be is boring. When people talk about me, I'd like them to say, Carol's basically a short Bill Bradley. Or, Carol's kind of like Al Gore in a skirt.

Carol Moseley Braun

My parents were always philosophizing about how to bring about change. To me, people who didn't try to make the world a better place were strange.

Carlos Beltran

I don't want to be hiding from people. It would be difficult to be recognized everywhere, so that I couldn't do things ordinary people do.

Carlos Fuentes

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

C. S. Lewis

Read and Re-Read--"Re-reading, we always find a new book.

Agnes Repplier

Diaries tell their little tales with a directness, a candor, conscious or unconscious, a closeness of outlook, which gratifies our sense of security. Reading them is like gazing through a small clear pane of glass. We may not see far and wide, but we see very distinctly that which comes within our field of vision.

Agnes Repplier

For my part, the good novel of character is the novel I can always pick up; but the good novel of incident is the novel I can never lay down.

Alan Tudyk

Reading is a heady thing. You can be into the action of someone's thoughts and take a whole trip down someone's ruminations while seconds tick by in the world that they're in, but you can't really do that in film. Some films can, but not too much.

Charlotte Bronte

For I too liked reading, thought of a frivolous and childish kind; I could not digest or comprehend the serious or substantial.

Charles Dudley Warner

Nothing is worth reading that does not require an alert mind.

Charles de Gaulle

Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.

Charles Dickens

Mr. Pickwick took a seat and the paper, but instead of reading the latter, peeped over the top of it, and took a survey of the man of business, who was an elderly, pimply-faced, vegetable-diet sort of man, in a black coat, dark mixture trousers, and small black gaiters; a kind of being who seemed to be an essential part of the desk at which he was writing, and to have as much thought or sentiment.

CeeLo Green

My first rap name was Ralo. Because my first name is Carlos. I likened myself to what Busta Rhymes was doing when he first came out. And what Onyx did when they first came out - they reminded me of me.

Rabih Alameddine

No one needs to be reminded of racism in soccer: the xenophobia, the nativism and, yes, nationalism.

Larry Ellison

Maui reminded me of San Diego: beautiful, but crowded.

Scott Weiss

I don't like sweating the details, and I'm pretty disorganized. To be a better leader, I need to stay on top of these shortcomings, and being reminded really helps.

Roy Moore

They don't want to be reminded that there is an authority higher than the authority of the state.

Rich Galen

What it reminded me of the other day is 'Baghdad Bob' saying there are no Americans at the airport.

Mike Hargrove

It reminded me of the first two weeks of Spring Training. But they'll be better.

Clint Johnson

It reminded me of my senior year at Leavenworth. I was the go-to-guy there too.

Rhys Ifans

The older I get, I'm really reminded how important the arts are to our wellbeing as a society.

Carol Moseley Braun

The really important victory of the civil rights movement was that it made racism unpopular, whereas a generation ago at the turn of the last century, you had to embrace racism to get elected to anything.

Carlos Fuentes

What's happened at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq is one of the grossest violations of human rights under the Geneva Conventions that we have record of. It is simply monstrous.

Agnes Repplier

The thinkers of the world should by rights be guardians of the world's mirth.

Alan Keyes

Our founders understood that divine authority was necessary in order to establish a ground on which the weak, the defenseless, the powerless, the poor and the wretched would be able to stand, in the face of every human power whatsoever, and demand respect for their human rights and dignity.

Alan Keyes

Rights come from God and only from God.

Charlotte Bronte

Unlawful pleasure, trenching on another's rights, is delusive and envenomed pleasure—its hollowness disappoints at the time, its poison cruelly tortures afterwards, its effects deprave forever.

Charles Sumner

Give me the centralism of liberty; give me the imperialism of equal rights.

Charles Edward Merriam

In speaking of natural rights, therefore, it is essential to remember that these alleged rights have no political force whatsoever, unless recognized and enforced by the state.

Charles Dickens

I'm awful dull, but I hope I've beat out something nigh the rights of this at last. And so GOD bless you, dear old Pip, old chap, GOD bless you!

Carol Leifer

There were very few women comics when I started out doing stand-up. But I always saw that as a great advantage.

Charlie Crist

I was a Republican, and I saw the activists and what they were doing; it was intolerable to me.

Orlando Cabrera

When I did that I said 'Wow,' ... I got the video, and when Tejada saw the play when he got out, he started clapping.

Brian Wilson

I met Paul in 1967, Ringo in 1985, and I saw George Harrison in a nightclub somewhere in L. A. I never met John.

David Sedaris

If you stepped out of the shower and saw a leprechaun standing at the base of your toilet, would you scream, or would you innately understand that he meant you no harm?

Gabrielle Zevin

My grandparents used to bring me books every time they saw me.

Jandy Nelson

In one split second I saw everything I could be, everything I want to be. And all that I'm not.

Roman Gutierrez

We still saw some of our inexperience today. That will be the case, but there were still some steps of improvement.

Brian May

I really thought I was pretty good before I saw Hendrix, and then I thought: Yeah, not so good.

David Lange

Death is very, very terminal.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

Left to ourselves we tend immediately to reduce God to manageable terms.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

I have always been very fortunate in my working life in terms of the, I say that like I've not been fortunate at all in my private life.

Cheryl Strayed

You get to define the terms of your life.

Steve Squyres

We're not going to take any risks. It's a big crater in terms of diameter, but really shallow. It's nothing like Endurance.

Joe Lhota

Would I be the 3rd term of Rudy Giuliani or the 4th term of Mike Bloomberg? It'll be neither. It'll be the first term of Joe Lhota. We're all different.

Billy Bob Thornton

The only times you'll see me in terms of the movie business is when I have to go to the premieres of my own movies. I don't go to see ones that aren't mine because I don't even like going to mine.

Willis Reed

We would still have been here if we could have come to terms with the union.

Joe Mathis

We are already tapped out in terms of volunteers and staff.

Kathryn Harrison

I wrote 'The Kiss' 12 hours a day for six months.

Kent Haruf

I write in a journal first, briefly. Then read something I've read many times before, for about half an hour, then rework what I wrote the day before.

Kent Haruf

Writing is the hardest thing I know, but it was the only thing I wanted to do. I wrote for 20 years and published nothing before my first book.

Alan Furst

I wrote out little mysteries in longhand, and my mother typed them out on an old Remington.

Ed Emberley

I don't know how old I was when I started writing books. But, I was born in 1931, and I wrote my first book in 1961.

Gail Carson Levine

I wrote as a kid, but I never wanted to be a writer, particularly. I had been drawing and painting for years and loved that.

Alice Walker

My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig.

Natalie Babbitt

My husband wrote the story for my first book, but then he didn't want to do that anymore. So if I was going to go on being an illustrator, I had to start writing the stories, too.

William Gibson

In 1981, I was a futurist - or at least I was a guy who put on a futurist hat occasionally - and I wrote about the 21st century.