Famous Quotes & Sayings

Edgar Allan Poe

There are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction.

Eleanor Roosevelt

The purpose of life afterall is to live it.

Eduardo Saverin

For charity purposes, how do I help? A lot of prospective levers and tools have come into my life.

Edsger Dijkstra

It used to be the program's purpose to instruct our computers; it became the computer's purpose to execute our programs.

Basil Bunting

Prose exists to convey meaning, and no meaning such as prose conveys can be expressed as well in poetry. That's not poetry's purpose.

Eddie Vedder

Music's at its best when it has a purpose.

Elizabeth Dole

We have learned that power is a positive force if it is used for positive purposes.

Deepak Chopra

Everyone has a dharma or purpose in life.

Abraham Lincoln

Nothing will divert me from my purpose.

Gregory Benford

My feeling is that science is virtually an unexplored ground. It's very visible - more so all the time - but there's no fiction that tells us how scientists think, and they really don't think the way that other people do.

Mark Billingham

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

Denis Diderot

How easy it is to tell tales!

Elizabeth Bowen

That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.

Elizabeth Bowen

[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.

Elizabeth Bowen

... any fictionis bound to be transposed autobiography.

Sarah Dessen

I have a tendency to embellish: I think it's a weakness of fiction writers. Once you know how to make a story better, it's hard not to do it all the time.

Elizabeth McCracken

Short fiction is like low relief. And if your story has no humor in it, then you're trying to look at something in the pitch dark. With the light of humor, it throws what you're writing into relief so that you can actually see it.

Sue Monk Kidd

I have a fondness for historical fiction, something wondrous like 'Wolf Hall,' but I'll read most anything as long as the story grabs my mind or my heart, and preferably both. You would be hard pressed, however, to find science fiction on my shelves.

Italo Calvino

I am more and more convinced that literature is made up of works, genres, schools, discussions, problems, collective work in order to solve certain problems.

Italo Calvino

For the critic, the author does not exist; only a certain number of writings exist.

Isabella Rossellini

I live my everyday life as a person, and I react to my photos from a certain distance. When I look at a photo, I detach myself and look at it as a product - not as me, Isabella.

Rick Perlstein

In the rest of the industrialized world, your boss can't fire you unless he or she can give a good reason. In America, with certain exceptions, your boss can fire you for any reason at all or for no reason at all.

Robert Kazinsky

Being a 'hunk' is going to do great things for my love life, and I'll get a lot more offers. But I'll certainly never see myself as one.

Robert Mankoff

There's public humor, and there's private humor, and they're all appropriate in their own way, and you shouldn't - just as you wouldn't have a megaphone and say certain things that you would say around your friends - things that are perfectly all right within your close social group with whom you share a certain context.

Roger von Oech

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but play is certainly the father.

Kevin Mitnick

I don't know the capabilities of our enemies. But I found it quite easy to circumvent security at certain phone companies throughout the United States. So if an inquisitive kid can do it, why can't a cyberterrorist do it?

Mallory Ortberg

It certainly was unusual growing up with two fairly well-known pastors as my parents.