Famous Quotes & Sayings

Louis Gossett, Jr.

I didn't know anything about acting, I didn't know anything about theater, but I was just an exceptional student at high school. I wanted to play ball; I'm going after a basketball scholarship and be a doctor. I got injured and my marks began to drop.

Brian Keith

We started slowly, but then began to put things together. We were 3-9 to begin the year, but we have gone 9-4 the rest of the way.

John Timoney

We stopped the rescue operation around 11 o'clock (Thursday) night, ... As the tide came in, the structure began to move, and other parts began to collapse again. We made the decision to pull our divers out.

Helen Scannell

We started from scratch. Immediately people began dropping things off - and they were nice things. Our goods are gently used. We are not a junkyard or garbage drop.

Leslie Cockburn

When I was at graduate school in London, I began working at NBC News, which had a thriving documentary unit.

M.I.A.

Sri Lanka is an island off the coast of India. There's two ethnicities there; one the Sinhalese, which is the majority and the government, and the minority, who are the Tamils. That's where I'm from. And my lifetime sort of began there; I spent 10 years, and I was there during when the war started and fled as a refugee to England.

Natasha Trethewey

Writing 'Native Guard,' I didn't know I was working on a single book. I began writing that book because I was interested in the lesser-known history of these black soldiers stationed off the coast of my hometown.

Natasha Tsakos

I was commissioned in 2003 to create an original show, and began developing 'Upwake.' 'Upwake' tells the story of Zero, a modern-day business man, going to work with his life in a suitcase, stuck between dream and reality and not able to decipher the two. I wanted 'Upwake' to have the same audiovisual qualities as a movie would.

Ma Jian

While I was writing 'Stick Out Your Tongue' in Beijing, the police began knocking on my door again. As soon as I finished the book, I moved to Hong Kong so that I could work undisturbed on my next novel.

Charles Dickens

There is not a manufacturer or tradesman in existence, who would not employ a man who takes a reasonable degree of pride in the appearance of himself and those about him, in preference to a sullen, slovenly fellow, who works doggedly on, regardless of his own clothing and that of his wife and children, and seeming to take pleasure or pride in nothing.

Charles Dickens

Father Time is not always a hard parent and though he tarries for none of his children, often lays his hand lightly upon those who have used him well; making them old men and women inexorably enough, but leaving their hearts and spirits young and in full vigor. With such people the gray head is but the impression of the old fellow's hand in giving them his blessing, and every wrinkle but a notch in the quiet calendar of a well-spent life.

Charles Dickens

There is nothing--no, nothing--innocent or good, that dies and is forgotten; let us hold to that faith or none. An infant, a prattling child, dying in the cradle, will live again in the better thoughts of those that loved it, and play its part through them in the redeeming actions of the world, though its body be burnt to ashes or drowned in the deep sea.

Charles Dickens

In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice.

Charles Dickens

It always grieves me to contemplate the initiation of children into the ways of life when they are scarcely more than infants. It checks their confidence and simplicity, two of the best qualities that heaven gives them, and demands that they share our sorrows before they are capable of entering into our enjoyments.

Charles Caleb Colton

How strange it is that we of the present day are constantly praising that past age which our fathers abused, and as constantly abusing that present age, which our children will praise.

Charles Caleb Colton

Religion has treated knowledge sometimes as an enemy, sometimes as a hostage; often as a captive and more often as a child; but knowledge has become of age, and religion must either renounce her acquaintance, or introduce her as a companion and respect her as a friend.

Charles Caleb Colton

Gaming is the child of avarice, but the parent of prodigality.

Charles Caleb Colton

Avarice begets more vices than Priam did children and like Priam survives them all. It starves its keeper to surfeit those who wish him dead, and makes him submit to more mortifications to lose heaven than the martyr undergoes to gain it.

Robert Lacey

Monarch: The Life and Reign of Elizabeth II.

Cate Blanchett

I think that the benefit of playing someone like Queen Elizabeth is that so much has been written about her, and there's so much speculation about her - was she a hermaphrodite? She's so mythologised, and there are a lot of images of her.

Teresa Medeiros

Elizabeth Taylor was an incurable romantic at heart. She never gave up on the notion that a love strong enough to last a lifetime was waiting for her around the next corner.

Charles Nelson Reilly

My friends are very rich. Elizabeth Taylor sends flowers the size of the bathtub. I'm not kidding.

Sarah Addison Allen

I'm a huge fan of Alice Hoffman, Fred Chappell and Susan Elizabeth Phillips.

Howard Shore

I live in Tuxedo Park, N.Y. and spend time in the West Village, where my wife Elizabeth Cotnoir, a writer-producer and documentary filmmaker, has an office.

Kelly Butler

I have a sister who is Elizabeth. If my sister was waiting in traffic, she wouldn't say she waited for 40 minutes; she would say she waited for 42 minutes. I modeled Elizabeth after her.

Cindy Emfinger

I felt pretty good even when she got past Savannah because Michelle and Elizabeth and (goalie) were where they were supposed to be. (Roach) just made a nice play.

Ed Smart

Keep your eyes open for her. We still feel as strongly as ever that Elizabeth is out there, that she is still waiting for us to find her.

Charles Caleb Colton

The greatest genius is never so great as when it is chastised and subdued by the highest reason.

Charles Caleb Colton

Moderation is the inseparable companion of wisdom, but with it genius has not even a nodding acquaintance.

Charles Caleb Colton

The drafts which true genius draws upon posterity, although they may not always be honored so soon as they are due, are sure to be paid with compound interest in the end.

Charles Caleb Colton

Genius in one grand particular is like life. We know nothing of either but by their effects.

Charles Dickens

Eccentricities of genius.

Camille Paglia

The male orientation of classical Athens was inseparable from its genius. Athens became great not despite but because of its misogyny.

Camille Paglia

Sappho and Emily Dickinson are the only woman geniuses in poetic history.

William Shakespeare

There is none but he Whose being I do fear; and under him My genius is rebuked, as it is said Mark Antony's was by Caesar.

Bob Packwood

Historically, the Republicans have been geniuses at throwing away advantages.

Charles Caleb Colton

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

Charles Caleb Colton

Great minds had rather deserve contemporaneous applause without obtaining it, than obtain without deserving it. If it follow them it is well, but they will not deviate to follow it.

Charles Caleb Colton

In life we shall find many men that are great, and some that are good, but very few men that are both great and good.

Charles Caleb Colton

Speaking generally, no man appears great to his contemporaries, for the same reason that no man is great to his servants--both know too much of him.

Charles Dickens

The secret was such an old one now, had so grown into me and become a part of myself, that I could not tear it away.

Charles Dickens

So new to him," she muttered, "so old to me; so strange to him, so familiar to me; so melancholy to both of us!...

Charles Dickens

But, in this separation I associate you only with the good and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you have done far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may.

Charles Dickens

Let me feel now what sharp distress I may.

Charles Simmons

True greatness consists in being great in little things.

Charles Dickens

The night crept on apace, the moon went down, the stars grew pale and dim, and morning, cold as they, slowly approached. Then, from behind a distant hill, the noble sun rose up, driving the mists in phantom shapes before it, and clearing the earth of their ghostly forms till darkness came again.

Charles Dickens

I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.

Charles Dickens

The great grindstone, Earth, had turned when Mr. Lorry looked out again, and the sun was red on the courtyard. But, the lesser grindstone stood alone there in the calm morning air, with red upon it that the sun had never give, and would never take away.

Charles Dickens

I recollected one story there was in the village, how that on a certain night in the year (it might be that very night for anything I knew), all the dead people came out of the ground and sat at the heads of their own graves till morning.

Charles Dickens

Possibly we might even improve the world a little, if we got up early in the morning, and took off our coats to the work.

Charles Stanley

On Sunday morning, I'm not nervous... I can't wait to tell what God wants me to say.

Alan Watts

The morning glory which blooms for an hour differs not at heart from the giant pine, which lives for a thousand years.

Alan Watts

To define is to limit, to set boundaries, to compare and to contrast, and for this reason, the universe, the all, seems to defy definition....Just as no one in his senses would look for the morning news in a dictionary, no one should use speaking and thinking to find out what cannot be spoken or thought.

Alan Moore

I really can't be bothered going to a barber. And shaving every morning, that's nightmarish. I spent my teenage years covered in tiny little bits of toilet paper.

David Mitchell

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

Beth Henley

But here's the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as a playwright, you maintain your copyright

Billy Bob Thornton

I'm more influenced by novelists than I am by filmmakers.

Dean Koontz

Not all popular novelists are good, but all good novelists are, sooner or later, popular.

Aleksandar Hemon

I resist when someone calls me a novelist: it implies some kind of inherent superiority of the novel. I'm not a novelist, I'm a writer.

A. S. Byatt

I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.

Kurt Vonnegut

I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.

Jane Smiley

A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing.

Jane Smiley

Novelists never have to footnote.

Jonah Lomu

Until 1998, I worked in marketing at ASB bank. I loved it.

Hector Tobar

Divorce was illegal in Chile up until 2005 or so.

Jerry Angelo

We're going to look. We'll always look until we get that solved.

Ed Troyer

We're going to keep doing it until (the problem) disappears.

Ruth Miller

Wait until you see what we have planned.

Tracey Emin

I didn't have an exhibition anywhere until I was 30. My first exhibition was at 30, and then for my first show in America, I'm 50. It's kind of all right: I'm just a slow burner.

Tom Sharpe

We must not only strike the iron while it is hot, we must strike it until it is hot.

Elle King

I started with the guitar around 12 years old but didn't learn the banjo until I was about 18 or 19.

Miles Austin

She's about 40 pounds. She just sits there until I get annoyed.

Matthew Engel

Verbosity was an established Victorian trait.

Charles Caleb Colton

Wit may do very well for a mistress, but [I] should prefer reason for a wife.

Alan Jackson

I've been a lot of places, and my wife, Denise, she likes a lot of the fancy restaurants. I'm more of a basic eater. I still go into Cracker Barrel. Those are the kind of people who like the kind of music I'm making.

Akshay Kumar

Why bother with Google when I have a wife who knows everything about everything!

Chris Black

My wife will tell you that I'm very particular and it's annoying for other people. I eat the same thing every day. I go to the gym at the same time every day. I go to L.A. all the time, so I take that same 9:30 flight. I will not take another one.

Chick Corea

My wife, Gayle, is a wonderful musician and singer. We share music, so it's a deep bond.

Dave Chappelle

My wife asked me once if I weren't a comedian what I would do. I couldn't answer the question. I never imagined doing anything else.

Dave Barry

You can be the smartest person in the world - which Bill Clinton is, and if he's not, his wife is - and care more than anybody else in the world - which he does, I don't doubt that for a minute. And you can care so much that you're willing to be dishonest - you can tell people one thing but do another because you really know it's for their own good. And you'll still screw it all up. Because the whole premise of what you're doing is wrong!

Buddy Hackett

My wife said to me, "I want to be cremated." I said, "How about Tuesday?"

Bryan Ferry

I met John Lennon and he was with his wife in Tokyo. I met him there.

Yingluck Shinawatra

One thing that I can't avoid the fact, because I am Thaksin's youngest sister.

Fred Janicke

I've been here 22 years and I'm the youngest welder, so there you go.