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.

Alan Moore

All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That's how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day." The Joker - The Killing Joke

Al Roker

If I was having a bad day, eating was like self-medicating. But if you abuse food, you still have to use that substance that you abuse every day. You have to learn to use it responsibly.

Chris Cleave

The only bad days as a writer are the ones when you are too cowardly or too lazy to sit down at the keyboard and give it everything you have.

Chris Bangle

Designers think everything done by someone else is awful, and that they could do it better themselves, which explains why I designed my own living room carpet, I suppose.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

It is easy to romanticize poverty, to see poor people as inherently lacking agency and will. It is easy to strip them of human dignity, to reduce them to objects of pity. This has never been clearer than in the view of Africa from the American media, in which we are shown poverty and conflicts without any context.

Chesty Puller

Where the hell do you put the bayonet?

Cathy Freeman

When I'm in a bad mood, I don't listen.

Casey Affleck

I have a very bad relationship with mice.

Michael Steele

You know, conservatism is not a bad thing. It's not a pejorative.

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.

Jeff Lemire

We want to take our time with 'Descender' and let the story unfold at its own pace. But we have carefully planned each world and worked to give each its own look and feel. And each of the 9 core worlds will play a role in the series.

Steve Squyres

There are cliffs the rover could fall over and die if we aren't careful. We are gong to proceed carefully and methodically.

Lee Byung-hun

Hollywood has a longer pre-production period and they juggle shooting schedules more carefully for each cast. In Korea, we shoot day and night without much break.

Steve Struzyk

When you stress the weight room, you have to be careful about your message.

Rob Friedman

We have not always been as careful as we could have been. The current ratings system provides a solid foundation for helping parents guide their children and the enhancements that we propose today offer substantial potential for improvement.

Rob Friedman

We have not always been as careful as we could have been, ... The current ratings system provides a solid foundation for helping parents guide their children and the enhancements that we propose today offer substantial potential for improvement.

Kevin Kinel

We've still got to be careful to get things done at sectional. Once he's at the state meet, he'll be at home. That says a lot for a freshman, but that's sort of the way he is. He loves to race and loves a challenge.

Nic Pizzolatto

If there was one overarching theme to 'True Detective,' I would say it was that, as human beings, we are nothing but the stories we live and die by - so you'd better be careful what stories you tell yourself.

Michael Tanner

Whether it will help remains to be seen. We have to be careful not to generalize before we have enough information.

Charles Caleb Colton

It is far better to borrow experience than to buy it.

Chogyam Trungpa

One has to taste an experience for oneself and find out if the thing is genuine or helpful. Then, before discarding something, one has to go further, so that one gets firsthand experience.

Lukas Haas

It was a wonderful experience to work with Sylvia. She pushed me to be more powerful with my acting, and she told me scores of the most incredible stories I've ever heard. She is amazing.

Lorraine Toussaint

I hope that whenever my daughter has a negative experience, I'm there to talk about it and remind her how we feel when it's done to her so that she doesn't do it to others.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The person who has lived the most is not the one who has lived the longest, but the one with the richest experiences

Mike Cisco

We've all had experience to this point, which has been good.

Diana DeGarmo

West Side Story. It's a totally new experience for me. I've always loved theater.

African Proverb

We start as fools and become wise through experience

Dan Brooks

When you've got talent from top to bottom, everybody's playing to count. It's a tremendous experience to play without that mental cushion.

Charles Dickens

Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own; and from morning to night, as from the cradle to the grave, it is but a succession of changes so gentle and easy that we can scarcely mark their progress.

Charles Dickens

Try not to associate bodily defect with mental, my good friend, except for a solid reason

Charles Caleb Colton

Of two evils, it is perhaps less injurious to society, that good doctrine should be accompanied by a bad life, than that a good life should lend its support to a bad doctrine.

Charles Dickens

A good thing can't be cruel.

Charles Simmons

Promptitude is not only a duty, but is also a part of good manners; it is favorable to fortune, reputation, influence, and usefulness; a little attention and energy will form the habit, so as to make it easy and delightful.

Alan Moore

If you give me a typewriter and I'm having a good day, I can write a scene that will astonish its readers. That will perhaps make them laugh, perhaps make them cry - that will have some emotional clout to it. It doesn't cost much to do that.

Alan Alda

The best things said come last. People will talk for hours saying nothing much and then linger at the door with words that come with a rush from the heart.

Akira Kurosawa

A truly good movie is enjoyable too. There’s nothing complicated about it.

Brian Nicola

We want them all to go on, and realistically they all have a shot. They all want to be state-placers and they're all looking to be pretty tough. I just want them all to have a good time.

Rod Sterling

The poet, whether in prose or verse, the creator, can only stamp his images forcibly on the page, in proportion, as he has forcibly felt, ardently nursed, and long brooded over them

Kara Bunte

The outpouring of support has been amazing. People are now starting to see the images on TV and want to help.

Bruce Jackson

War is big and there are only so many reporters and only so many places for their words and images to appear. Choices are made constantly.

Nate Lowman

I make images from things I find serendipitously. I don't know what it is, but I know it when I see it. It could be from a newspaper, on the street. It could be something I fell over.

Raymond Berry

You made the impossible possible. Those images of your performances still haven't faded.

Daria Werbowy

I guess a lot of people don't realise, but I'm always playing a character when I'm working. When you're always having people's images projected on you, who 'Daria' is as a person sort of disappears.

Jon Oringer

Rex is 60 years old with 13 million images and 10 million in archive. It's the first time we've had a historic archive to work with, which is super interesting.

Dan Gilroy

The smorgasbord of images now presented to us is getting bloodier. They're becoming more frequent - almost hourly.

Charles Stiles

If they get a message from a sender that has images and links enabled one day, and another one the next day where they're not, they tend not to trust that so much, or think there was an error. It sends an unclear message to the consumer.

Charles Dickens

The civility which money will purchase, is rarely extended to those who have none.

Charles Dickens

Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prism, are all very good words for the lips.

Charles Dickens

I made a compact with myself that in my person literature should stand by itself, of itself, and for itself.

Charles Caleb Colton

If we steal thoughts from the moderns, it will be cried down as plagiarism; if from the ancients, it will be cried up as erudition.

Charles Caleb Colton

There is nothing more imprudent than excessive prudence.

Charles Caleb Colton

Bigotry murders religion to frighten fools with her ghost.

Charles Caleb Colton

The Grecian’s maxim would indeed be a sweeping clause in Literature; it would reduce many a giant to a pygmy; many a speech to a sentence; and many a folio to a primer.

Charles Caleb Colton

Those that are the loudest in their threats are the weakest in their actions.

Charles Dickens

We are so very 'umble.

James J. Gibson

The perception of what a thing is and the perception of what it means are not separate, either.

Joseph Capriotti

We are police officers. We don't sit back and watch. We have to get out and do something. Being able to do something means a lot.

Tom Reilly

We're not going to propose a trail ... through the rifle range next year as a means to the end.

Dee Boersma

Whenever you do science it's important to know individuals. And that means you have to distinguish one from another, just like we give names to people we have to be able to give names to penguins. And we often do that with bands.

Shaw Wu

When everyone else is slowing and you're not, it means share gains.

Natalie Massenet

For Net-A-Porter and its customers, luxury means exceptional service, 24-7 - wherever they are, whenever they have time.

Chris Harper

We're so young that when they start to press, we think that means we need to speed up.

Sathya Baba

Unity is the secret of social progress, and service to society is the means to promote it. 

Jimmy Smith

We're more settled. A new regime means changes, and things have settled down.

Lee Siegel

The Web critic relies on his or her readers for attentiveness and approval.

Christina Baker Kline

I think a lot of readers are looking for a book they can talk about.

Binyavanga Wainaina

I like the idea of readers feeling a familiarity, whether it's with Africa or childhood.

Khaled Hosseini

Whatever the readers feel when they're reading my books, I feel it tenfold when I'm writing it.

Sarah MacLean

There is a whole generation of romance readers and writers who suffer from what I like to think of as 'Thorn Birds' Fever.

Noah Cowan

Just tell your readers they can come down and see anything and it should be good,

James O'Shea

We can communicate to our readers what this is about without running it.

J. A. Konrath

Together, Amazon and I are giving readers what they want - inexpensive, professional ebooks.

Barbara Park

There are many reluctant young readers who haven't yet found books that make them laugh.

Charles Caleb Colton

Mental pleasures never cloy; unlike those of the body, they are increased by reputation, approved by reflection, and strengthened by enjoyment.

Charles Dickens

We owed so much to Herbert's ever cheerful industry and readiness, that I often wondered how I had conceived that old idea of his inaptitude, until I was one day enlightened by the reflection, that perhaps the inaptitude had never been in him at all, but had been in me.

Charles Dickens

I could not help wondering in my own mind....how it came to pass that our joints of meat were of such extraordinary shapes - and whether our butcher contracted for all the deformed sheep that came into the world; but I kept my reflections to myself.

Alan Pardew

It (Arsenal) is an English club but not an English success. It's probably a greater reflection of youngsters from France and elsewhere in Europe.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

Man for all his genius is but an echo of the original Voice, a reflection of the uncreated Light.

Byron Katie

When you do The Work, you see who you are by seeing who you think other people are. Eventually you come to see that everything outside you is a reflection of your own thinking. You are the storyteller, the projector of all stories, and the world is the projected image of your thoughts.

Cesare Pavese

Childhood is not only the childhood we really had but also the impressions we formed of it in our adolescence and maturity. That is why childhood seems so long. Probably every period of life is multiplied by our reflections upon the next.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

As it unfolded, the structure of the story began to remind me of one of those Russian dolls that contain innumerable ever-smaller dolls within. Step by step the narrative split into a thousand stories, as if it had entered a gallery of mirrors, its identity fragmented into endless reflections.

Jane Austen

Her own thoughts and reflections were habitually her best companions.

Charles Dickens

Marley was dead, to begin with ... This must be distintly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.

Alan Rickman

The point about a great story is that it's got a beginning, a middle and end.

Alan Rickman

It is an ancient need to be told stories. But the story needs a great storyteller. Thanks for all of it, Jo.

Alan Rickman

I like it when stories are left open.

Alan Moore

This is an IMAGINARY STORY...aren't they all?

Alan Moore

Everybody has their story to tell.

Alan Ball

I really love storytelling, and I love the stories as they reveal themselves. It's an incredibly nourishing process; it's probably the closest I come to having a religion.

Chris Cleave

Our stories are the tellers of us.

Chris Cleave

We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us.

Dwyane Wade

We know we can win. That's what we're all here for. . . . This is my third year here and it's like it's my third different team, but we can win.

Lenny Clark

We're not disappointed at all. Third place is good.

Brandon Jacobs

If it's third-and-one, then I'm going in, no ifs or buts about.

Jim Rich

Sen. Landrieu said she wanted to be our third senator.

Brittany Howard

I once had this massacred afro in third grade. Parts were bigger than others. It was just terrible.

Kevin O'Leary

When you're an investor, you can look at the quantitative and qualitative elements of an investment, but there's a third aspect: What you feel in your gut.

Charles Nelson Reilly

I live at the dentist's. I'm on my third set of teeth that they put in with nails and screws.

Rupert Grint

One in the third film, I'm looking forward to meeting one of the Dementors.

Bartolo Colon

More than puzzled, I'm ticked off. I had two outs and I couldn't get the third one.

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.

Arthur Bryant

Say what you have to say in the fewest possible words.

Robert Klein

In some articles written about me, writers have said I'm a link between the old and the new, and I think, in a certain sense, that's legitimate.

Brian K. Vaughan

There are probably writers who are much more visual than I am and some who are less. I like to think of myself as a happy medium.

Charlaine Harris

Well, you know, writers just suck up new experiences - we're just like the vacuum cleaners of newness.

Sara Sheridan

Scottish writers are particularly successful in the crime genre.

Aminatta Forna

Most writers I know go for word counts, and I used to be a journalist, so I guess that's ingrained.

Claire Tomalin

Most writers can tell stories of how their books failed to be made into films.

John Dos Passos

If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.

Jean Paul

Never write on a subject until you have read yourself full of it.