Famous Quotes & Sayings

Jodi Picoult

My first job was as an assistant in the local library. Self-fulfilling prophecy?

Jodi Picoult

Writing is total grunt work. A lot of people think it's all about sitting and waiting for the muse. I don't buy that. It's a job. There are days when I really want to write, days when I don't. Every day I sit down and write.

Jodi Picoult

Eric understands that the world is rarelythe way it is supposed to be. And he knows that, given the chance, we don't have to wait for someone to make messes of our lives. We do a good enough job, ourselves.

Jodi Picoult

Suddenly, I don't want to be this person anymore. I don't want to pretend I'm fooling the world when I'm not. I want someone else to have a plan for me, because I'm not doing a very good job myself.

Jodi Picoult

parenting isn't a noun but a verb--an ongoing process instead of an accomplishment. And that no matter how many years you put into the job, the learning curve is, well, fairly flat.

Jodi Picoult

You signed no contract to become a parent, but the responsibilities were written in invisible ink. There was a point when you had to support your child, even if no one else would. It was your job to rebuild the bridge, even if your child was the one who burned it in the first place.

John Grisham

Writing's still the most difficult job I've ever had - but it's worth it.

John Green

The way we still essentializ, we're constantly essentializing people as merely poor, or merely other, and in the end you can't have a relationship with people. I think the biggest job of adulthood is to learn to imagine other people complexly.

John Green

One of the jobs of a writer is to add nuance and ambiguity to that straight line that people often draw to very specific kinds of heroism. Most of us don't get to be Snooki. For most of us heroism has to be in our everyday lives.

John Green

And now life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future—you go to high school so you can go to college so you can get a good job so you can get a nice house so you can afford to send your kids to college so they can get a good job so they can get a nice house so they can afford to send their kids to college.

John Green

The prospect of a world that contains neither humans nor Z's is not so terrifying. Nature will take its world back. Animals will frolic and fight. There will be no lord of the manor, which is not such a bad thing, because it seems to me that people have done a pretty poor job of guiding the biosphere for the last few thousand years.

John Green

I bet if you look at the average teenager and the average adult, the average teenager has read more books in the last year than the average adult. Now of course the adult would be all like, 'I'm busy, I got a job, I got stuff to do.' WHATEVER! READ! I mean, you're watching CSI: Miami. Why would you be watching CSI: Miami, when you could be READING CSI: Miami, the novelization?

John Green

The job of reading is to use stories as a way into seeing other people as we see ourselves

John Green

I'm at the eye doctor. I'm always at the eye doctor. It's like this is my profession. I am no longer a writer, I'm now an optomoligical patient. By the way, this job doesn't pay well.

John Green

We do an epically bad job of acknowledging one another's work and checking our sources.

John Green

...I will continue to underscore that I don't think authorial intent is all that important to a reading experience, and I certainly don't think the job of reading is to divine authorial intent.

John Green

Ultimately, it doesn't matter if the author intended a symbol to be there, because the job of reading is not to understand the authors intend. The job of reading is to see into other people as we see ourselves.

Patton Oswalt

The truly great actors, like Charlize Theron, are just like, "I'm an actor. For hire. I show up, I do my job." There's no "I'm just waiting for the inspiration." They just do their jobs. They say, "Let's go over the scene a few times and get it."

Pat Summitt

You're wondering what a bale of hay has to do with success. Well, there's a trick to loading hay. You have to use your knee. What you do is, you put your right knee behind it and half kick it up in the air. That way you get some lift on it. ... My point is, there are certain ways to make a hard job easier.

Pat Summitt

Discipline helps you finish a job, and finishing is what separates excellent work from average work.

P. J. O'Rourke

If a journalist shows a facility for praise he's liable to be offered a job in public relations or advertising and the next thing you know he's got a big office, a huge salary and is living in a fine home with a lovely wife and swell kids - another career blown to hell.

P. J. O'Rourke

To mistrust science and deny the validity of the scientific method is to resign your job as a human. You'd better go look for work as a plant or wild animal.

P. J. O'Rourke

In the past a man was expected to give his seat on a bus to a woman. Today it would be much more courteous for that man to give her his job.

Mary Schmich

On an average day, we allow ourselves the fiction that we own a piece of our workplace. That's part of what it takes to get the job done. Deeper down, we know it's all on loan.

Martin Gore

I think being in a band is probably the only job when you're actively encouraged to be out of it most of the time.

Martin Freeman

Your job, as an actor, is never to just do what you're told. That's boring, and life is too short. It's your job to bring something, and it will either be to other people's taste or your own taste, and you have to try things out. Actors say, "Well, as long as the director's happy," but I don't believe that and I don't agree with that. I want the director to be happy, but if I'm not happy, I won't sleep at night.

Martin Filler

During the modern period, the vanguard architect has usually relied on small residential jobs both to supply a steady income and to serve as 'sketches' for ideas that are often later translated to the larger scale of public commissions.

Martin Filler

Winning the Pritzker assures a flood of work in one's seventies and eighties, jobs necessarily carried out by assistants as the demands of modern-day cultural stardom and the inevitable waning of physical capacities prevent many architects from attaining the transcendent final phase more easily achieved by artists in other mediums.

Marshall Allman

For me, the more talented the actor is that I'm working with, the easier my job is because the circumstances of a scene are easier to believe when the people around you are in the moment just as much as you are.

Marsha Norman

We have to hear the stories of women at all ages of their lives in order to really present a picture of what it felt like to be alive in our time. That's what our job is as writers is to present that and create it. Our job as writers isn't to make as much money as we can. Our job is to create a record of this time. That's why if you leave out women and the stories of women, we failed at our mission. All of us. Men and women.

Mark Mothersbaugh

Before MTV, if you put out an album that sold 50,000 copies, your band could afford not to have day jobs for a while. That meant you could stick around, put out another album or two. Maybe it would be the second or third album where you'd make the statement you'd been trying to make all along.

Mark Mills

It's the job of old people to disapprove of everything young people do. . .If we don't disapprove, then the young have nothing to fight against and the world will never change. It cannot move on.

Mark Millar

First, believe in your ability to create the future. That's what leaders do-that is our job. Understand reality but never be imprisoned by it. Reality is a moment in time. The future has not yet been written-it is written by leaders.