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.

Boris Yeltsin

I refer to calls for humanitarian intervention in the affairs of another state - a new idea, this - even when they are made under the pretext of defending human rights and freedoms

Auguste Comte

Ideas govern the world, or throw it into chaos.

Brian Selznick

Once I'm given an idea for a story I have a million ideas on how it should be illustrated, but I don't have a big shoebox full of unfinished ideas.

Brian Tracy

Your success will be affected by the quality and quantity of new ideas you suggest.

Brian Tracy

Ideas will be the major source of new wealth.

Brenda Ueland

You do not know what is in you - an inexhaustible fountain of ideas.

Brad Meltzer

For me, Superman's greatest contribution has never been the superhero part: it's the Clark Kent part - the idea that any of us, in all our ordinariness, can change the world.

Jane Jacobs

Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.

Jane Jacobs

New ideas often need old buildings.

Anders Hejlsberg

I value simplicity over everything; I always look for simplicity.

Jared Diamond

History as well as life itself is complicated -- neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.

Desmond Llewelyn

What is so brilliant about the gadgets is their simplicity.

Edward Sapir

One of the glories of English simplicity is the possibility of using the same word as noun and verb.

Anna C. Brackett

Look carefully through all the claims pressing upon you in your complicated life, and decide once and for all what it is that is the one really important and overmastering duty in it, and should be the one dominating aim. Then remember that if you succeed in that, the others, so multifarious, are really no more than the fringe of the garment, and that you need not spend so much anxiety over them, provided that the one most important is faithfully attended to.

Constantin Brancusi

Simplicity is complexity resolved

e. e. cummings

Whatever's merely willful, and not miraculous (be never it so skilful) must wither fail and cease - but better than to grow beauty knows no.

E. B. White

The beginner should approach style warily, realizing that it is himself he is approaching, no other; and he should begin by turning resolutely away from all devices that are popularly believed to indicate style - all mannerisms, tricks, adornments. The approach to style is by way of plainness, simplicity, orderliness, sincerity.

Aleksandar Hemon

Wherever there's capitalism there's this inclination toward simplicity. There's also a human need to process complicated things by turning them into something else.