Famous Quotes & Sayings

Bill Bryson

When the poet Paul Valery once asked Albert Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. "Oh, that's not necessary," he replied . "It's so seldom I have one.

Carl Sagan

Goddard represented a unique combination of visionary dedication and technological brilliance. He studied physics because he needed physics to get to Mars. In reading the notebooks of Robert Goddard, I am struck by how powerful his exploratory and scientific motivations were - and how influental speculative ideas, even erroneous ones, can be on the shaping of the future.

Chad Harbach

Looking at and shaping your own work is a very intuitive process. You see something you've written in your notebook. It's there on the page and either feels right or it doesn't, and it's hard sometimes to go beyond that and discover why it feels that way.

Chad Harbach

Writing on a computer feels like a recipe for writer's block. I can type so fast that I run out of thoughts, and then I sit there and look at the words on the screen, and move them around, and never get anywhere. Whereas in a notebook I just keep plodding along, slowly, accumulating sentences, sometimes even surprising myself.

Charles de Lint

I write on a computer, but I've run the complete gambit. When I was very young, I wrote with a ballpoint pen in school notebooks. Then I got pretentious and started writing with a dip pen on parchment (I wrote at least a novel-length poem that way). Moved on to a fountain pen. Then a typewriter, then an electric self-correct. Then someone gave me a word processor and I was amazed at being able to fit ten pages on one of those floppy discs.

Charles de Lint

Growing up, I'd already decided I wanted to be a beatnik. A Bohemian poet, I thought. Or a musician. Maybe an artist. I'd dress in black turtlenecks and smoke Gitanes. I'd listen to cool jazz in clubs, getting up to read devastating truths from my notebook, leaning against the microphone, cigarette dangling from my hand.

Charles de Lint

As the new work fills my notebooks, I've come to realize that the characters in my stories were so real because I really did want to get close to people, I really did want to know them. It was just easier to do it on paper, one step removed.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

When I am praying the most eloquently, I am getting the least accomplished in my prayer life. But when I stop getting eloquent and give God less theology and shut up and just gaze upward and wait for God to speak to my heart He speaks with such power that I have to grab a pencil and a notebook and take notes on what God is saying to my heart.

Cherrie Moraga

A writer will write with or without a movement; but at the same time, for Chicano, lesbian, gay and feminist writers-anybody writing against the grain of Anglo misogynist culture-political movements are what have allowed our writing to surface from the secret places in our notebooks into the public sphere.

Tina Brown

When Obama heralds another 'teachable moment,' it means he has already made an egregious rookie mistake.

Irving Ravetch

Well, I always say the law was meant to be interpreted in a lenient manner. And that's what I try to do, is sometimes I lean to one side of it, sometimes I lean to the other.

Will Chase

'Miss Saigon' taught me what it means to help carry a big show, and it had some of the most gorgeous songs wrote.

Gary Bauer

The polls mean virtually nothing, ... We're not tottering on the edge. Each week we're picking up momentum.

John Anastos

The patients are happier, and we can serve more patients. More patients mean more revenues.

David Selby

And I haven't met too many actors along the way that haven't told me how much the show has meant to them. It's one of the reasons they say they are doing what they're doing, today.

David Wenham

My representation overseas can't stand me doing theatre because it takes me out of action. But it's what I want to do. If it means passing up other possibilities, them's the breaks.

David Foster

With Celine Dion, we were selling 25 million records a pop. 'Pop' stands for 'popular.' It means we're plugging into the masses.

Dev Hynes

'Chamalkay' is an old Guyanese slang word. It means a 'young mischievous girl.' It's not derogatory, but it isn't over complimentary, either. It was probably a word I just Googled one day, and the song kind of played into the feel of that.

Benoit Mandelbrot

Everybody in mathematics had given up for 100 years or 200 years the idea that you could from pictures, from looking at pictures, find new ideas. That was the case long ago in the Middle Ages, in the Renaissance, in later periods, but then mathematicians had become very abstract.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

There was a time when Patience ceased to be a virtue. It was long ago.

Betty White

Long ago, I did a five-and-a-half-hour-a-day, six-day-a-week talk show for four years, early on, in Los Angeles - local show. And when you are on that many hours with no script, you know, you get very comfortable, maybe overly comfortable with that small audience.

Edward Hoagland

We New Yorkers see more death and violence than most soldiers do, grow a thick chitin on our backs, grimace like a rat and learn to do a disappearing act. Long ago we outgrew the need to be blowhards about our masculinity; we leave that to the Alaskans and Texans, who have more time for it.

Louis C. K.

Every year white people add 100 years to how long ago slavery was. I've heard educated white people say, 'slavery was 400 years ago.' No it very wasn't. It was 140 years ago...that's two 70-year-old ladies living and dying back to back. That's how recently you could buy a guy.

Kurt Vonnegut

This world is not a vale of sorrows if you will recognize discriminatingly what is truly excellent in it; and if you will avail yourself of it for mutual happiness and well-being. Therefore, let us explain as often as possible, and particularly at the departure of life, that we base our faith on firm foundations, on Truth for putting into action our ideas which do not depend on fables and ideas which Science has long ago proven to be false.

Billy Sunday

If good preaching could save the world, it would have been done long ago.

Charles M. Schulz

I gave up trying to understand people long ago. Now I let them try to understand me!

Charles Lyell

I long ago suggested the hypothesis, that in the basin of the Thames there are indications of a meeting in the Pleistocene period of a northern and southern fauna.