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.

Brandon Sanderson

I take two hours off for my family every day. And then I write fourteen hours.

Anthony Shadid

The best journalism is sometimes about footnotes—when we write small to say something big.

Ben Mezrich

There's always going to be controversy when you write the way I write.

Ben Marcus

When I started writing at 18 or 19, I had a fear of anything autobiographical, but I've come to realise that my writing is very autobiographical at the emotional level.

Ben Okri

The best writing is not about the writer, the best writing is absolutely not about the writer, it's about us, it's about the reader.

Barbara Kingsolver

I know I have to write about the things that keep me awake at night.

Barbara Kingsolver

If you're writing, you're a writer. If you're talking about it or thinking about it, I'm not so sure. Writing is ninety-eight percent work and two percent magic.

Barbara Kingsolver

It's a funny thing: people often ask how I discipline myself to write. I can't begin to understand the question. For me, the discipline is turning off the computer and leaving my desk to do something else.

John Allen

As pope, he has to be the pastor of everyone.

Michael Fincke

Space has shown us over the past years that things aren't always what we expect, and that we need to be ready.

Orlando Bloom

Now my favourite pastime is to take a bath with my son.

Ben Okri

The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like.

Art Buchwald

We seem to be going through a period of nostalgia, and everyone seems to think yesterday was better than today. I don't think it was, and I would advise you not to wait ten years before admitting today was great. If you're hung up on nostalgia, pretend today is yesterday and just go out and have one hell of a time.

Aziz Ansari

To be honest, I tend to romanticize the past, and though I appreciate all the conveniences of modern life, sometimes I yearn for simpler times.

C. S. Lewis

Most of all, perhaps, we need an intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has anything magical about it, but we cannot study the future.

Bryant H. McGill

Education should prepare our minds to use its own powers of reason and conception rather than filling it with the accumulated misconceptions of the past.

Celia Green

Society expresses its sympathy for the geniuses of the past to distract attention from the fact that it has no intention of being sympathetic to the geniuses of the present.

Alan Lightman

I consider myself an essayist and a fiction writer. In the essays, I certainly have been influenced by some of the leading science essayists. Like Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas.

Arthur C. Clarke

But please remember: this is only a work of fiction. The truth, as always, will be far stranger.

Anton Chekhov

The aim of fiction is absolute and honest truth.

Laurie Levenson

The popularity of these programs has an impact. There is a blurring of fiction and reality.

Denis Diderot

How easy it is to tell tales!

Abraham Verghese

Medicine, you see, is my first love; whether I write fiction or nonfiction, and even when it has nothing to do with medicine, it's still about medicine. After all, what is medicine but life plus? So I write about life.

Doris Lessing

What they [critics of Lessing's switch to science fiction] didn't realize was that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time.

Allen Ginsberg

There is nothing to be learned from history anymore. We're in science fiction now.

Michael Connelly

What I do now is I write fiction. I ground my fiction in the reality of a place called Los Angeles.