Famous Quotes & Sayings

Edward Said

To say that we're going to end countries or eradicate terrorism, and that it's a long war over many years, with many different instruments, suggests a much more complex and drawn-out conflict for which, I think, most Americans aren't prepared.

E. B. White

In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty. Only under a dictatorship is literature expected to exhibit an harmonious design or an inspirational tone.

E. B. White

In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty.

E. B. White

Just to live in the country is a full-time job. You don't have to do anything. The idle pursuit of making a living is pushed to one side, where it belongs, in favor of living itself, a task of such immediacy, variety, beauty, and excitement that one is powerless to resist its wild embrace.

E. B. White

New York is part of the natural world. I love the city, I love the country, and for the same reasons. The city is part of the country. When I had an apartment on East Forty-Eighth Street, my backyard during the migratory season yielded more birds than I ever saw in Maine.

E. B. White

There is nothing more likely to start disagreement among people or countries than an agreement.

Duncan Hunter

The decision to leave [Iraq] should be based solely on the judgment of the combatant commanders on the ground who say, "My Iraqi counterparts can now handle this particular area of the country on their own with minimum American support or with no American support." When they can do that, we should leave.

Dustin Clare

There are parliamentarians in Australia I really support. People through history, you know? Men like Ned Kelly in Australia who challenged ideals. Governor William McKell in Australia really set the tone of building a nation. The fundamentals of the country are built on what the governor McKell created. I think Sea Shepherd (Conservation Society) is a wonderful organization and I support what they do.

Dustin Hoffman

For me as an American, the most painful aspect of this is that I believe that administration has taken the events of 9/11 and has manipulated the grief of the country and I think that's reprehensible,

Miley Cyrus

The reason I never want a book to end is that I start to feel like the characters are my friends. I'll miss them when they're gone.

Thomas Carlyle

What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books.

Bobby Fischer

I was going to do a book about the first prearranged Karpov-Kasparov match, '84-'85. But the God-damn Jews have stolen my entire file on that.

Rosecrans Baldwin

Bookstores don't exactly dot the American highway in the grand manner of Sbarros.

Andrea Dworkin

I have spent 20 years writing these books. Had I wanted to say men are beasts and scream, that takes 30 seconds.

Andrea Dworkin

If pornography releases sexual tension, why don't we send recipe books to the starving?

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

You're sincere, but in order not to upset your views you avoid talking with people who think differently. You pick your thoughts from conversations with people like yourself, from books written by people like yourself. In physics they call it resonance. You start out with modest opinions, but they match and build each other up to a scale ...

Alberto Manguel

Our books will bear witness for or against us, our books reflect who we are and who we have been, our books hold the share of pages granted to us from the Book of Life. By the books we call ours we will be judged

Alberto Manguel

From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers, and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story.

Bella Thorne

I practice reading all the time. I read everything and having so many scripts to read, which really helps out as well.

John Taylor Gatto

Close reading of tough-minded writing is still the best, cheapest, and quickest method known for learning to think for yourself... Reading, and rigorous discussion of that reading in a way that obliges you to formulate a position and support it against objections, is an operational definition of education... reading, analysis, and discussion is the way we develop reliable judgment, the principle way we come to penetrate covert movements behind the facade of public appearances.

Margaret Mahy

Being a librarian certainly helped me with my writing because it made me even more of a reader, and I was always an enthusiastic reader. Writing and reading seem to me to be different aspects of a single imaginative act.

Jeanette Winterson

Reading is a rendezvous with your soul.

Emily Perkins

Writing is a way of life. I do it because it's a way of experiencing the world, and trying to come to terms with it and understand it and express it and engage with it. And to me it's a natural extension of reading.

Jonathan Lethem

Context is everything. Dress me up and see. I'm a carnival barker, an auctioneer, a downtown performance artist, a speaker in tongues, a senator drunk on filibuster. I've got Tourette's. My mouth won't quit, though mostly I whisper or subvocalize like I'm reading aloud, my Adam's apple bobbing, jaw muscle beating like a miniature heart under my cheek, the noise suppressed, the words escaping silently, mere ghosts of themselves, husks of empty breath and tone.

Jon Stewart

Oh my god... Kerry is boring even when Bush is reading him.

Kate Bernheimer

The fact that fairy tales remain a literary underdog-undervalued and undermined-even as they shape so many popular stories, redoubles my certainty that it is time for contemporary fairy tales to be celebrated in a popular, literary collection. Fairy tales hold the secret to reading.

Kate Atkinson

Sylvie’s knowledge, like Izzie's, was random yet far-ranging, ‘The sign that one has acquired one’s learning from reading novels rather than an education…