Famous Quotes & Sayings

Northrop Frye

A writers desire to write can only have come from previous experience of literature, and he'll start by imitating whatever he's read, which usually means what the people around him are writing.

Norman Mailer

At bottom, I mean profoundly at bottom, the FBI has nothing to do with Communism, it has nothing to do with catching criminals, it has nothing to do with the Mafia, the syndicate, it has nothing to do with trust-busting, it has nothing to do with interstate commerce, it has nothing to do with anything but serving as a church for the mediocre. A high church for the true mediocre.

Norman Mailer

The fact that we've been a great democracy doesn't mean we will automatically keep being one if we keep waving the flag.

Norman Mailer

When the wind carries a cry which is meaningful to human ears, it is simpler to believe the wind shares with us some part of the emotion of Being than that the mysteries of a hurricane's rising murmur reduce to no more than the random collision of insensate molecules.

Norman Mailer

The sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important, that the romantic spirit has dried up, that there is no shame today. We're all getting so mean and small and petty and ridiculous, and we all live under the threat of extermination.

Norman Mailer

Love asks us that we be a little braver than is comfortable, a little more generous, a little more flexible. It means living on the edge more than we care to.

Norman Lamm

However, the word madda in modern Hebrew specifically means science.

Norman Maclean

I had as yet no notion that life every now and then becomes literature—not for long, of course, but long enough to be what we best remember, and often enough so that what we eventually come to mean by life are those moments when life, instead of going sideways, backwards, forward, or nowhere at all, lines out straight, tense and inevitable, with a complication, climax, and, given some luck, a purgation, as if life had been made and not happened.

Norman Ralph Augustine

Law Number XXXII: Hiring consultants to conduct studies can be an excellent means of turning problems into gold, your problems into their gold.

Orrin Hatch

A judicial standard means that a judicious decision can be entirely correct, even when the result does not line up with our preferred political positions or cater to certain political interests.

Orrin Hatch

But I bear witness to Christ, too. I really know him to be the savior of the world. And that means more to me than almost anything else I know.

Os Guinness

Calling means that everyone, everywhere, and in everything fulfills his or her (secondary) callings in response to God's (primary) calling.

Orson Welles

In common with all Protestant or Jewish cultures, America was developed on the idea that your word is your bond. Otherwise, the frontier could never have been opened, 'cause it was lawless. A man's word had to mean something.

Orson Welles

If you've noticed that I don't use long takes, it's not because I don't like them, but because no one gives me the necessary means to treat myself to them. It's more economical to make one image, then this image and then that image, and try to control them later, in the editing studio.

Orson Welles

I prefer the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.

Orson Welles

Cinema as a means of expression fascinates me.

Orson Welles

The only reason for doing a play is to make a statement about it, and by that I don't mean a conceit of the producer.

Orson Welles

The essential is to excite the spectators. If that means playing Hamlet on a flying trapeze or in an aquarium, you do it.

Ornette Coleman

For me, being an innovator doesn't mean being more intelligent, more rich, it's not a word, it's an action.

Orison Swett Marden

Thrift means that you should always have the best you can possibly afford, when the thing has any reference to your physical and mental health, to your growth in efficiency and power.

Olusegun Obasanjo

I will not say the fact that there are no European Union observers at an election means that it will not be fair and free.

Olivia Colman

I am a bit sickie happy. I am prone to black clouds too, but... I am embarrassed about them. It's like: 'My diamond shoes are too tight. My money clip doesn't fit all my fifties.' I mean - really. Shut up.

Olivia Colman

You see thousands of films you forget the minute you come out of the cinema, don't you? Because they don't mean anything. It's the tough ones like 'Breaking the Waves' and 'Nil By Mouth' that stay with you, that you never forget. I'd like to leave a few of those behind if possible.

Olivia De Havilland

I don't need a fantasy life as once I did. That is the life of the imagination that I had a great need for. Films were the perfect means for satisfying that need.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be 'consistent'.

Oliver Stone

But in answer to your question about the conspiracy angle, I think that any historian worth his salt, and this is where I fault Stephen Ambrose and a lot of these guys who attack me - not all of life is a result of conspiracy by any means! Accident occurs alongside conspiracy.

Oliver Sacks

I had never thought about what it might mean to be deaf, to be deprived of language, or to have a remarkable language (and community and culture) of one’s own. Up to this point, I had mostly thought and written about the problems of individuals–here I was to encounter an entire community.

Oliver Sacks

I feel I should be trying to complete my life, whatever completing a life means.

Oliver Sacks

A disease is never a mere loss or excess. There is always a reaction on the part of the organism or individual to restore, replace or compensate for and to preserve its identity, however strange the means may be.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

To be civilized is to be potentially master of all possible ideas, and that means that one has got beyond being shocked, although one preserves one's own moral aesthetic preferences.

Olga Korbut

And from that nineteen sixty four, this was my goal to go to Olympic Games. And I realized what does it mean, Olympic Games, like big celebration.

Olga Kurylenko

Why marry? If you're not married, you just leave each other and it's cool. Who needs the paper? To me it means nothing.

Octavia Butler

Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation. Civilization, like intelligence, may serve well, serve adequately, or fail to serve its adaptive function. When civilization fails to serve, it must disintegrate unless it is acted upon by unifying internal or external forces.