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.

Claire McCaskill

I'm the only United States Senator in the country that I'm aware of that's had the far left up on TV and the far right up on TV against me at the same time.

Clint Eastwood

Michael Moore and I actually have a lot in common. We both appreciate living in a country where there's free expression. But Michael, if you ever show up at my front door with a camera, I'll kill you. I mean it.

Dylan Moran

I don't go to different countries to criticise their political system and tell them what they should be doing - what do I know?

Dylan Moran

It's such a bullshit move. Transparently so. It's obviously supposed to give succor to people who feel pissed off because someone from another country got a job that they feel should've been given to them. But that's what people voted against here. They voted against the movement of labor - that kind of fluidity - because they want a Britain that no longer exists, and they can't get it.

e. e. cummings

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals the power of your intense fragility:whose texture compels me with the colour of its countries, rendering death and forever with each breathing (i do not know what it is about you that closes and opens;only something in me understands the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses) nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands -excerpt of #35 from "100 Selected Poems

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

The H-bomb rather favors small nations that doesn't as yet possess it; they feel slightly more free to jostle other nations, having discovered that a country can stick its tongue out quite far these days without provoking war, so horrible are war's consequences.

E. B. White

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

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.

Lynne Truss

The advent of the mobile phone was a disaster. We are forced to listen, open-mouthed, to other people's intimate conversations. Increasingly, we are all in our virtual bubbles when we are out in public, whether we are texting, listening to iPods, reading or just staring dangerously at other people.

Jonathan Lethem

Poetry is supposed to be musical. But people don't understand prose. They're so used to reading journalism - clunky, functional sentences that convey factual information - facts, more than just the surfaces of things.

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.

Arthur Schopenhauer

The ultimate foundation of honor is the conviction that moral character is unalterable: a single bad action implies that future actions of the same kind will, under similar circumstances, also be bad.

Jodi Benson

What we try to do at Disney and through Disney character voices is really maintain the integrity of our classic characters at all costs. So Ariel needs to be me for every project, and if there are any other Ariels floating around out there, it's not necessarily Disney.

Alexander Payne

I spend a long time casting, but once I've cast a film there's a reason why I selected those people. So I'm hands-on in selecting the cast, hands-off to see what they do with their characters, and hands-on again to offer suggestions.

Debby Ryan

I love people like Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, people who create and write their own stuff - especially when there's just not enough cool, interesting characters out there.

E. M. Forster

Chess is a forcing house where the fruits of character can ripen more fully than in life

E. M. Forster

It is devilish difficult to criticise society & also create human beings.

E. M. Forster

Axiom : Novel must have either one living character or a perfect pattern: fails otherwise.

Douglas Sirk

Your characters have to remain innocent of what your picture is after.

Douglass North

The evolution of government from its medieval, Mafia-like character to that embodying modern legal institutions and instruments is a major part of the history of freedom. It is a part that tends to be obscured or ignored because of the myopic vision of many economists, who persist in modeling government as nothing more than a gigantic form of theft and income redistribution.