Famous Quotes & Sayings

Charles Dickens

Be natural my children. For the writer that is natural has fulfilled all the rules of art.

Charles Dickens

To see the butcher slap the steak before he laid it on the block, and give his knife a sharpening, was to forget breakfast instantly. It was agreeable too - it really was - to see him cut it off so smooth and juicy. There was nothing savage in the act, although the knife was large and keen; it was a piece of art, high art; there was delicacy of touch, clearness of tone, skilful handling of the subject, fine shading. It was the triumph of mind over matter; quite.

Charles Caleb Colton

Eloquence is the language of nature, and cannot be learned in the schools; but rhetoric is the creature of art, which he who feels least will most excel in.

Charles Dickens

Mrs Joe was a very clean housekeeper, but had an exquisite art of making her clenliness more umcomfortable and unacceptable than dirt itself. Cleanliness is next to godliness, and some people do the same by their religion.

Charles Dickens

We all draw a little and compose a little, and none of us have any idea of time or money.

Charles Spurgeon

Beware, I pray thee, of presuming that thou art saved. If thy heart be renewed, if thou shalt hate the things that thou didst once love, and love the things that thou didst once hate; if thou hast really repented; if there be a thorough change of mind in thee; if thou be born again, then hast thou reason to rejoice: but if there be no vital change, no inward godliness; if there be no love to God, no prayer, no work of the Holy Spirit, then thy saying "I am saved" is but thine own assertion, and it may delude, but it will not deliver thee.

Charles Spurgeon

Alas, if our children lose the crown of life, it will be but a small consolation that they have won the laurels of literature or art.

Charles Spurgeon

Come boldly, 'O believer, for despite the whisperings of Satan and the doubtings of thine own heart, thou art greatly beloved.

Alanis Morissette

I firmly believe that the only reason why I'm on this planet, the only reason why I live, breathe, and exist is, that it's my duty to be as honest as possible in my art.

Chris Goutman

We are probably the only show in daytime that has kept characters on. We've had a number of veterans who have been on the show for over 40 years, and how they relate these veterans to their grandchildren is something I think is very real.

Max Sydow

There are characters which you spend a lot of time with, and you get to know, and you feel that -- suddenly it's a friend somewhere. And they are nice to return to.

Jim Rash

Wherever a writer grew up, they're obviously influenced by that area, and I'm sure their characters are pulled from those experiences.

Connie Willis

When you've written your characters into a corner, you just hand the manuscript over to your partner and make her fix it.

Li Bingbing

I often hear actors say during their interviews: 'I want to play a crazy person, a murderer, or someone who's on edge.' But that question scares me. I mean, of course there are characters I'd like to play, but I can't really say specifically who they are. It's much too hard to play a convincing normal person as it is.

Lee Bermejo

Who doesn't want to draw Batman or Superman? Everyone would like to be able to draw them. I've been really lucky when it comes to the characters that I get to illustrate.

Mark Billingham

When you think of a great twist or a red herring or a way of misdirecting the reader, it is good, but you know that they are just tricks at the end of the day, and the way to keep interest is to write characters that people care about.

Hayden Schlossberg

A lot of times in movies, especially in sequels, the characters become caricatures and just sort of improv machines and joke machines, rather than people you can actually connect to.

Sherwood Schwartz

When you say the name Gilligan, you know who that is. If a show is good, if it's written well, you should be able to erase the names of the characters saying the lines and still be able to know who said it. If you can't do that, the show will fail.

Alan Cooper

Form follows function straight to hell.

Ben Stiller

What the hell am I doing with my life?

Charlie Munger

I regard it as very unfair, but capitalism without failure is like religion without hell.

Charlie Munger

Berkshireis not as good as it was in terms of percentage compounding [going forward], but it's still a hell of a business.

Charlie Munger

How could economics not be behavioral? If it isn't behavioral, what the hell is it?

Edmund White

Hell is God's Absence.

Diana Vreeland

I'm for everybody. There are no set rules. But if one's not a joiner. To hell with all of them!

Diana Vreeland

Truth is a hell of a big point with me. Now I exaggerate—always.

Alan Vega

Life is a gamble. And I took a chance, man. And here I am, talkin' to you today, thirty years later, wondering what the hell I did in the first place!

Charles Dickens

I don't remember who was there, except Dora. I have not the least idea what we had for dinner, besides Dora. My impression is, that I dined off Dora, entirely, and sent away half-a-dozen plates untouched. I sat next to her. I talked to her. She had the most delightful little voice, the gayest little laugh, the pleasantest and most fascinating little ways, that ever led a lost youth into hopeless slavery. She was rather diminutive altogether. So much the more precious, I thought.

Charles Dickens

There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose.

Charles Dickens

Never close your lips to those whom you have already opened your heart.

Charles Dickens

Mystery and disappointment are not absolutely indispensable to the growth of love, but they are, very often, its powerful auxiliaries.

Charles Dickens

To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached, is not in my nature. I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart.

Charles Dickens

You know what I am going to say. I love you. What other men may mean when they use that expression, I cannot tell. What I mean is that I am under the influence of some tremendous attraction which I have resisted in vain, and which overmasters me. You could draw me to fire, you could draw me to water, you could draw me to the gallows, you could draw me to any death, you could draw me to anything I have most avoided, you could draw me to any exposure and disgrace. This and the confusion of my thoughts, so that I am fit for nothing, is what I mean by your being the ruin of me.

Charles Dickens

What lawsuits grow out of the graves of rich men, every day; sowing perjury, hatred, and lies among near kindred, where there should be nothing but love!

Charles Dickens

I loved you madly; in the distasteful work of the day, in the wakeful misery of the night, girded by sordid realities, or wandering through Paradises and Hells of visions into which I rushed, carrying your image in my arms, I loved you madly.

Charles Dickens

I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.

Mildred Ellison

Now teachers and principals at our schools can go up there for the training because it's just amazing.

Kenneth Trump

I don't think the principal is doing anything radical.

Roger Fox

It's sad, because she's an outstanding teacher and he was a very strong principal as well.

Tina Brown

Reputation is a timely subject, now that nobody has one.

Kathy Gibson

She does have extra-long arms. We know that about her. What timely shot-blocking!

Amanda Voorhis

She always has some timely makes from the perimeter.

Dan DeCarlo

I started working with Timely in 1946. Stan Lee hired me.

John Greene

If we had had the timely hit, we were right there. We just didn't get it.

Bob Poole

We just couldn't get timely hitting, very frustrating.

Joe Siciliano

We had our opportunities to score, but we just didn't get the timely hitting.

Charles Caleb Colton

For what are the triumphs of war, planned by ambition, executed by violence, and consummated by devastation? The means are the sacrifice of many, the end, the bloated aggrandizement of the few.

Charles Caleb Colton

War is a game in which princes seldom win, the people never.

Charles Caleb Colton

Mystery magnifies danger, as a fog the sun, the hand that warned Belshazzar derived its horrifying effect from the want of a body.

Charles Caleb Colton

Men will wrangle for religion, write for it, fight for it, die for it; anything but live for it.

Charles Caleb Colton

Wars are to the body politic, what drams are to the individual. There are times when they may prevent a sudden death, but if frequently resorted to, or long persisted in, they heighten the energies only to hasten the dissolution.

Charles Dickens

Why am I always at war with myself? Why have I told, as if upon compulsion, what I knew all along I ought to have withheld? Why am I making a friend of this woman beside me, in spite of the whispers against her that I hear in my heart?

Charles Dickens

I believe that the heaviest blow ever dealt at liberty's head will be dealt by this nation in the ultimate failure of its example to the earth.

Charles Stross

There's a long-standing (50 year old) flame war within the field over whether it's "sci-fi" or "SF".SF has traditionally been looked down on by the literary establishment because, to be honest, much early SF was execrably badly written - but these days the significance of the pigeon hole is fading; we have serious mainstream authors writing stuff that is I-can't-believe-it's-not-SF, and SF authors breaking into the mainstream. If you view them as tags that point to shelves in bricks-and-mortar bookshops, how long are these genre categories going to survive in the age of the internet?

Charles Stross

I like lassic British spy thrillers. Seriously. If the cold war was still on, that's something I'd be writing.

Douglas Brinkley

Walter Cronkite had a golden rule for all wartime reporters: never self-aggrandize.