Famous Quotes & Sayings

Jamie Cullum

I have a piano in my kitchen. I read a great biography about Tom Waits that said that he had a piano in his kitchen; he had a grand piano in his kitchen. And I thought, 'Well, if Tom Waits has one, then I must.'

Gerald Nicosia

He was one of the first to treat these people as serious American writers, ... Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac.

Gerhard Schroeder

He has a biography that makes clear that he grew away from the (leftist) scene, and he's done great work for our country.

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.

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.

Karen Abbott

I don't consider 'American Rose' to be a biography so much as a microcosm of 20th-century America, told through Gypsy's tumultuous life - it's 'Horatio Alger meets Tim Burton.'

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.

Giles Foden

Ordinary Kenyans rightly want to be able to shop safely, and there is a long history of them doing just that, irrespective of their religion or that of the shop owner.

Colm Meaney

It's interesting because I haven't done a lot of period work in the past, but I always wanted to because I'm interested in history.

Rick Perlstein

I'm reverent toward my sources. History is a team sport, and references are how you support your teammates.

F. Sionil Jose

My reading of philosophy and history is desultory; I know so much and yet so little.

Bernard Beckett

Many scholars have complained of our tendency to see history only in conflicts, but I am not convinced they are right. It is in conflict that our values are exposed.

Bernard Berenson

Between truth and the search for it, I choose the second.

Antoine Rivarol

History is only time furnished with dates and rich with events.

Megan Smith

We have two boys, and one of our kids is much more interested in history and stories, so if you want him to do some calculations about lenses, you would start talking to him about Galileo... Then he would be into the lenses, but if you just start talking to him about lenses, he might not stay with you.

Scott Stossel

I've always been interested in intellectual history and in psychology, and anxiety is obviously something that's been a big part of my life.

Evangeline Lilly

I'm not a girl who needs to put on a whole face of make-up before I leave the house.

Frank Jordan

We daily share emotions, our personal and shared needs and hope.

C. S. Lewis

Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly.

C. S. Lewis

If He who in Himself can lack nothing, chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed.

Carrie Mae Weems

Sometimes my work needs to be photographic, sometimes it needs words, sometimes it needs to have a relationship with music, sometimes it needs all three and become a video projection.

Carrie Brownstein

I need a template of a template

Carrie Underwood

I say what I need to, not a whole lot more.

Carl Rogers

The elements in a relationship which seem impossible to share, the secretly disturbing, dissatisfying elements, are the most rewarding to share. This is a hard, risky, frightening thing to learn, and it needs to be re-learned over and over.

Carl Sagan

The Big Bang is our modern scientific creation myth. It comes from the same human need to solve the cosmological riddle [Where did the universe come from?]

Orhan Pamuk

I think novelists should be disciplined and self-imposed working hours. I work a lot, but I don't feel that I'm working. I always feel that there is a child in me, healthy, and I'm playing.

Pearl Cleage

I didn't have a dream of being a press secretary, I had a dream of being a playwright; I had a dream of being a novelist and a poet.

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.

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.

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.

Gina Prince-Bythewood

'Black film,' that term allows studios to just marginalize a movie and say, 'We've made our black film. We've made our film with people of color in it,' as opposed to, 'I just feel like people of color should be in every genre.'

John Boyne

I am opposed to war, to killing people, to any kind of hatred and violence.

Roger Cook

We need to have them playing as opposed to setting on the bench.

Jason Calacanis

The problem most people make with their media presence is they're trying to craft a media presence as opposed to just consistently publishing who they are.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste

I still take my own lunches to work. That way I can control what I'm eating, as opposed to another doughnut.

Charles Moore

I don't go there. It's why they give and how they give that is important, as opposed to how much they give.

Norman Finkelstein

I am opposed to any state with an ethnic character, not only to Israel.

Kate Winslet

I think heartbreak is something that you learn to live with as opposed to learn to forget.

Kate Winslet

I think there's a lot of pressure on young people to really be the thing that everyone is telling them that they are, opposed to discovering it for themselves.

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.

Chevy Stevens

Unfortunately, there's still a lot of beginning writers who think you can just write your first draft and hand it in.

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.

Arthur Bryant

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

Alan Moore

I could never be the kind of writer who went to the set of the movie and fussed and fretted about, 'Oh, that dialogue's wrong,' or 'That character doesn't look like that.' That would be insufferable.

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.

Hanya Yanagihara

I think that fiction writers can write about anyone. If you are writing a character, and the only thing they are to you is their otherness, then you haven't written a character.