Famous Quotes & Sayings

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.

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.

A. S. Byatt

Reading a newspaper is like reading someone's letters, as opposed to a biography or a history. The writer really does not know what will happen. A novelist needs to feel what that is like.

Denis O'Hare

I went on a Buddha jag. I read 'Confession of a Buddhist Atheist' by Stephen Batchelor and Karen Armstrong's biography of Buddha, which is a great book.

David A. Adler

My first biography was 'Our Golda: The Life of Golda Meir.' To research that book, I bought a 1905 set of encyclopedias. Those books told me what each of the places Golda Meir lived in were like when she lived there.

Dan Wakefield

I wrote a great deal about the Civil Rights Movement when I was writing for 'The Nation' in the '60s, and also for Esquire magazine. Reading the biography of Coffin, it just reminded me that in those days, when you saw the term 'Christian,' it usually meant people for civil rights and for justice.

Brad Grey

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

Italo Calvino

I'm only a novelist on occasion. Many of my books are made up of brief texts collected together, short stories, or else they are books that have an overall structure but are composed of various texts.

Elizabeth Thornton

Most of us know when we are about to react emotionally. We can feel it. Often there is a brief warning before the amygdala hijack. For some of us, it is butterflies in the stomach; for some, it is an increased heart rate, and for others, it is a feeling of agitation.

Michael Wilson

We had brief discussions with the SG and his entourage.

Tom Shales

Making music on TV used to be as common as commercials. In the '60s and '70s, prime time was stuffed with variety shows headlined by such major and treasured talents as Carol Burnett, Red Skelton, the Smothers Brothers and Richard Pryor, who had a very brief comedy-variety hour on NBC that was censored literally to death.

Erin O'Connor

A girl must have an indefinable magic, real character, a strong sense of self. Her role is to respond to the brief of a photographer or communicate the vision of a designer - while making whatever she does look utterly effortless and whatever she wears utterly seamless.

Mandy Patinkin

It's what Shakespeare's mission was - to illuminate our thoughts and struggles and bring about the possibility of getting the most we can out of a day as opposed to least in this brief moment we're here.

David Whyte

Regret is a short, evocative and achingly beautiful word: an elegy to lost possibilities even in its brief annunciation.

Marlon Wayans

I've never really lived with somebody. Only for very brief periods. I learned I'm not a good roommate. I'm better off when we visit each other. I like the mystery.

Tom Rath

Ignoring negative things that need to be changed is destructive and does nothing to alleviate negativity. Instead, we should focus on the way we're treating other people in our brief interactions with them.

Bennett Miller

Capote was an enormously and dangerously ambitious, talented, conflicted guy who really concealed himself from the public. He was at once a very public figure and a very private figure. And this is a movie that sort of peels back the public mask and gets into the heart of darkness.

Bennett Miller

Capote is one of those people who represents something larger than himself. I think that his ambition, his kind of success, and the downfall that followed are very contemporary.

Dan Futterman

Capote had these dueling motivations for being involved with this guy. He genuinely was fascinated with (Perry Smith), but he also saw him as a ticket to writing this great book.

Dylan Penn

My dream dinner party guests would be Ethel Kennedy, Truman Capote and Hunter S. Thompson.

James Wolcott

Truman Capote was a pop figure, but it wasn't until he went on David Susskind's show and had that extraordinary voice and manner that everyone could imitate, that he really took off as a figure.

Philip Hoffman

Somebody said the other day, at the end of the movie, you feel like Capote committed a crime, and that's exactly right. That's why the film works so well. You really have this sense that he's the one who committed the crime, and I think deep down inside, that's how he felt, too. That's something he could never come to terms with.

Bennett Miller

It was the perfect gift for Perry, who saw himself, like Thoreau, as an outsider persecuted by society. It made him feel good about himself, which is just what Capote wanted.

JJ Abrams

I'm really happy that I didn't see Capote until after we wrapped because I probably just would have been daunted because he was so remarkable in that movie.

Charles Caleb Colton

Hope is a prodigal young heir, and Experience is his banker; but his drafts are seldom honoured, since there is often a heavy balance against him, because he draws largely on a small capital, is not yet in possession, and if he were, would die.

Charles Caleb Colton

Hope is a prodigal young heir, and experience is his banker.

Charles Dickens

There are hopes, the bloom of whose beauty would be spoiled by the trammels of description; too lovely, too delicate, too sacred for words, they should only be known through the sympathy of hearts.

Chogyam Trungpa

Hope and fear cannot alter the seasons

Chester W. Nimitz

God grant me the courage not to give up what I think is right even though I think it is hopeless.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Once you lost all hope, time began to go faster and the senseless days deadened your soul.

Chris Johnson

We struggled last weekend at Jacksonville. Hopefully this will jump-start us to have a strong end of the season.

Phil Nevin

Where is he? It's his first day, and he's already 20 minutes late. I hope someone is going to make him run laps.

Maria Bamford

I never really thought of myself as depressed so much as paralyzed by hope.

Bryan Callen

Compare sending someone a text message and getting a love letter delivered by carrier pigeon. No contest.

Camille Claudel

Don't fear anything for your letters, they are burnt one by one and I hope you do the same with mine.

Curt Johnston

Unfortunately, it seems like there are always winners and losers with this kind of decision. They'll probably write letters to the editor, tell us how stupid we are, and tell us we don't listen to the public.

Austin Mahone

When I awake dramatically I start off my day by reciting aloud a fan letter.

David Nicholls

This isn't a letter, it's a gift.

Greg Strobel

Letters is antsy, but he's ready. He's been off quite a while and can't wait to mix it up with someone. He's a little nervous, too. It's been six weeks since a 'live' bout, so that's quite a mid-season break.

Carolyn Kizer

I used to get so many letters from students about the ending of 'Pro Femina.' So I had a stamp made that said 'irony, irony, irony' to put on a postcard and mail it back.

Terry Wogan

I get a lot of letters from people saying, 'How do I get into radio, how do I get into telly?' and I wish there was an answer, because there's no ladder. There are no parameters. You've just got to go in wherever you can, make the tea, and slowly make your way up the ladder.

Naguib Sawiris

Letters have been found with my name on assassination lists.

Charles Dickens

In the moonlight which is always sad, as the light of the sun itself is--as the light called human life is--at its coming and its going.

Charles Dickens

Bring in the bottled lightning, a clean tumbler, and a corkscrew.

Charles Caleb Colton

Secrecy of design, when combined with rapidity of execution, like me column that guided Israel in the deserts, becomes the guardian pillar of light and fire to our friends, a cloud of overwhelming and impenetrable darkness to our enemies.

Charles Caleb Colton

Light, whether it be material or moral, is the best reformer; for it prevents those disorders which other remedies sometimes cure, but sometimes confirm.

Charles Caleb Colton

Posthumous fame is a plant of tardy growth, for our body must be the seed of it; or we may liken it to a torch, which nothing but the last spark of life can light up; or we may compare it to the trumpet of the archangel, for it is blown over the dead; but unlike that awful blast, it is of earth, not of heaven, and can neither rouse nor raise us.

Charles Caleb Colton

Light, whether it be material or moral, is the best reformer.

Charles Dickens

What connexion can there be, between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabout of Jo the outlaw with the broom, who had that distant ray of light upon him when he swept the churchyard-step? What connexion can there have been between many people in the innumerable histories of this world, who, from opposite sides of great gulfs, have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together!

Charles Dickens

Poetry makes life what lights and music do the stage.

Charles Spurgeon

Doubts about the fundamentals of the gospel exist in certain churches, I am told, to a large extent. My dear friends, where there is a warm-hearted church, you do not hear of them. I never saw a fly light on a red-hot plate.

Greg Jackson

We were as fundamentally sound defensively during that stretch as I've ever seen us.

S. Walker

We wrote more tickets this week than I've ever seen on a Super Bowl.

Marc Morial

To outsiders, you are seen as a shining light. You are seen as a beacon.

Sam Taylor-Johnson

I think it was Elisabeth Shue who said that if you start a movie with a woman seen through a man's eyes, that woman is objectified by him throughout.

Verne Lundquist

Oh, wow! In your life, have you ever seen anything like that?

Brian Katz

Shocking. I don't know if I've seen something like that in a big game.

Keyshawn Johnson

Since I've been in the NFL, I've never seen a team go 10-6 and not make the playoffs. I've seen teams that were 9-7 and 8-8 make the playoffs. It would be mind-boggling to be 10-6 and not make the playoffs.

Roy Evans

Since I have seen him play he has been stunning. He has unbelievable pace.

Scott Stoker

We've seen worse. We've come through a lot together.