Famous Quotes & Sayings

Brandon Sanderson

I am a writer who works from an outline. What I generally do when I build an outline is I find focal, important scenes, and I build them in my head and I don't write them yet, but I build towards them.

Barbara Mertz

I have no writing habit. I work when I feel like it, and I work when I have to - mostly the latter.

Brian Aldiss

A writer should say to himself, not, How can I get more money?, but How can I reach more readers (without lowering standards)?

Brenda Ueland

the only way to become a better writer is to become a better person.

Jane Hirshfield

The writing of an assay-type poem or a poem investigating perspective isn't an exercise of rational or strategic mind. Poems for me are acts of small or large desperation. They grapple with surfaces too steep to walk in any other way, yet which have to be traveled.

Jami Attenberg

I wish I could write while I'm on the road but it never works for me. I need to be sitting still.

Jami Attenberg

I've been told by people who write historical novels that you just sort of write the emotional truth first, the story at the core, and then you go back and research it at the end.

Anton Chekhov

Write only of what is important and eternal.

Anton Chekhov

If an intelligent, educated, and healthy man begins to complain of his lot and go down-hill, there is nothing for him to do but to go on down until he reaches the bottom--there is no hope for him. Where could my salvation come from? How can I save myself? I cannot drink, because it makes my head ache. I never could write bad poetry. I cannot pray for strength and see anything lofty in the languor of my soul. Laziness is laziness and weakness weakness. I can find no other names for them. I am lost, I am lost; there is no doubt of that.

Tony Russa

That's just the way he pitches. I think it has more to do with him mentally concentrating really well. He hasn't let anything get away from him.

Antisthenes

As rust corrupts iron, so envy corrupts man.

Baruch Spinoza

Men would never be superstitious, if they could govern all their circumstances by set rules, or if they were always favoured by fortune: but being frequently driven into straits where rules are useless, and being often kept fluctuating pitiably between hope and fear by the uncertainty of fortune's greedily coveted favours, they are consequently for the most part, very prone to credulity.

Baruch Spinoza

Surely human affairs would be far happier if the power in men to be silent were the same as that to speak. But experience more than sufficiently teaches that men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues, and can moderate their desires more easily than their words.

Augustus Hare

The greatest truths are the simplest, and so are the greatest men.

Ayn Rand

Great men can't be ruled.

Ayn Rand

If a dedication page were to precede the total of my work, it would read: To the glory of Man.

Ayn Rand

If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man's only moral commandment is: Thou shalt think. But a 'moral commandment' is a contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.

Ayn Rand

Men have been taught that it is a virtue to stand together. But the creator is the man who stands alone.

Elizabeth Bowen

The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.

Alejandro Jodorowsky

One does not go to the theater to escape from himself, but to reestablish contact with the mystery that we all are.

Alfred Korzybski

He who learns and learns and yet does not know what he knows, is one who plows and plows yet never sows.

Desmond Tutu

A life of wholeness does not depend on what we experience. Wholeness depends on how we experience our lives.

Deepak Chopra

What does not contain love must contain an illusion.

Andie MacDowell

We can sit around and go, okay, is there really a plan, does somebody really know what's happening, is it all planned out, because sometimes it just seems too remarkable to me the things that have happened to me.

Amy Carmichael

But God is the God of the waves and the billows, and they are still His when they come over us; and again and again we have proved that the overwhelming thing does not overwhelm. Once more by His interposition deliverance came. We were cast down, but not destroyed.

Simone Weil

Charity. To love human beings in so far as they are nothing. That is to love them as God does.

St. Vincent

The affairs of God are accomplished little by little and almost imperceptibly. The Spirit of God is neither violent nor hasty. He does all things in His time.