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.

bell hooks

Writing and performing should deepen the meaning of words, should illuminate, transfix and transform.

Barry White

I never learned to read or write music. Never wanted to fool with scales. That was boring, forced. The music I heard was free - flowing.

Charles Terry

I've played 654 concerts. That's never been done.

Pete Hald

I've never had three players at the same time who can score like they do.

Barbara Stanwyck

My only problem is finding a way to play my fortieth fallen female in a different way from my thirty-ninth.

Carice van Houten

I don't do method acting. If I play a farmer, I'm not gonna spend 3 weeks on a chicken farm. That's a bit too much for me.

C. S. Lewis

But the most obvious fact about praise -- whether of God or anything -- strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honor. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise. ... The world rings with praise -- lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favorite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favorite game. ... I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation.

Dikembe Mutombo

The NBA has more than 435 players and there are at least 100-some players doing more than expected. Shaq is doing a lot. Dwight Howard, [Manu] Ginobli. Dirk [Nowitzki] is doing a lot, and not just in Europe; he's reaching out to Africa and all other places.

Bruno Bettelheim

Play reaches the habits most needed for intellectual growth.

Bruce Willis

Ben Affleck (who plays A.J. Frost) and I got to actually go into the neutral buoyancy tank in actual $10 million spacesuits the astronauts wear in outer space, and that was pretty interesting

Elena Anaya

Surgery is a complicated thing to talk about, but I guess it could also be a dangerous thing to play with if you're not very secure about what you're doing.

Brandon Sanderson

I love to do what I do. So, I do work long hours.

Brian Andreas

You're not going to see people like this again for a long time, he said and I said I always saw people like this & he looked at me for a moment and said, You're not from around here, are you?

Jane Goodall

Chimpanzees have given me so much. The long hours spent with them in the forest have enriched my life beyond measure. What I have learned from them has shaped my understanding of human behavior, of our place in nature.

Carson McCullers

The trouble with me is that for a long time I have just been an I person. All people belong to a We except me. Not to belong to a We makes you too lonesome.

Charles Darwin

At no time am I a quick thinker or writer: whatever I have done in science has solely been by long pondering, patience and industry.

Jane Welsh Carlyle

the less one does, as I long ago observed, the less one can find time to do.

Susan B. Anthony

I don't want to die as long as I can work; the minute I can not, I want to go.

Dirk Benedict

From dear, dear Gloria Swanson, I learned how to live long, happy and free of health problems. I owe her my life.

Stephen Jay Gould

Hyper-selectionism has been with us for a long time in various guises; for it represents the late nineteenth century's scientific version of the myth of natural harmony all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds (all structures well designed for a definite purpose in this case). It is, indeed, the vision of foolish Dr. Pangloss, so vividly satirized by Voltaire in Candide the world is not necessarily good, but it is the best we could possibly have.