Famous Quotes & Sayings

Joseph Campbell

Whenever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or place. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science and history, mythology is absurd.

Will Rogers

There ain't nothing that breaks up homes, country, and nations like somebody publishing their memoirs.

Karen Abbott

I don't consider 'American Rose' to be a biography so much as a microcosm of 20th-century America, told through Gypsy's tumultuous life - it's 'Horatio Alger meets Tim Burton.'

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Not enough books focus on how a culture responds to radically new ideas or discovery. Especially in the biography genre, they tend to focus on all the sordid details in the life of the person who made the discovery. I find this path to be voyeuristic but not enlightening.

Noel Riley Fitch

Whether in print or other media, a good biography is more than a court record or a stringing together of already familiar sources. It breathes life into the subject.

Brad Grey

Mental illnesses involve biological brain disorders, no matter what Tom Cruise says,

Jamie Cullum

I have a piano in my kitchen. I read a great biography about Tom Waits that said that he had a piano in his kitchen; he had a grand piano in his kitchen. And I thought, 'Well, if Tom Waits has one, then I must.'

Floyd Skloot

For those who turn to literary biography for salacious details, 'Flannery' will disappoint. It is the biography of someone who had very little chance to live in the conventional sense, to experience events.

Robert Gottlieb

There are a few writers whose lives and personalities are so large, so fascinating, that there's no such thing as a boring biography of them - you can read every new one that comes along, good or bad, and be caught up in the story all over again.

Xavier Chambon

We want to put books in everyone's hands.

Ron Cooper

We have no problem with the audit. Our books are open to everyone.

James Patterson

The fact is that our kids aren't reading books - or frankly, much of anything lately. Schools are under funded, some schools even closing their libraries. Parents have to realize that it's their job, and not the school's job, to get kids into the habit of reading for fun.

Rene Descartes

The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries.

Joseph Annotti

There is case after case on the books that have upheld the validity of flood exclusion language, exactly the language Mr. Scruggs is contesting.

Joe King

When I'm not playing football, I'm usually studying. I want to go to college, so I got to keep reading books and doing my homework.

A. S. Byatt

You learn a lot about love before you ever get there. You learn at least as much about love from books as you do from watching your parents.

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.

Mark Frauenfelder

When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was George Gamow's 'One Two Three ... Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science.'

Charles Stanley

If God has positioned us in a certain place, we must leave all the details to Him.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I am drawn, as a reader, to detail-drenched stories about human lives affected as much by the internal as by the external, the kind of fiction that Jane Smiley nicely describes as 'first and foremost about how individuals fit, or don't fit, into their social worlds.'

John Ryding

The plunge in durable goods orders in January is entirely due to volatility in transportation. The underlying details of this report are much stronger than the headline.

Ashwin Sanghi

When working on a period, it is the finer details that evoke imagery that helps in cinematic adaptations.

Bjarne Stroustrup

And no, I'm not a walking C++ dictionary. I do not keep every technical detail in my head at all times. If I did that, I would be a much poorer programmer. I do keep the main points straight in my head most of the time, and I do know where to find the details when I need them.

Benny Goodman

Sometimes when you start losing detail, whether it's in music or in life, something as small as failing to be polite, you start to lose substance.

Diane Ackerman

I am a great fan of the universe, which I take literally: as one. All of it interests me, and it interests me in detail.

Cobi Jones

I've been working on my finishing for quite some time. It's just a question of paying attention to the minor details.

Mike Goodman

What we're seeing right now is most likely stage one, with other details to come in the near future.

Sean Callahan

We have to get up for every team we play. Our focus now is to win a state championship. Yeah, we want to get back at Hillsborough, but we see the big picture and that is to win games,

John Torchetti

We have to get our focus on the playoffs. Whatever it takes. The commitment, the attitude, the leadership.

Jan Vandemoortele

We have to focus now on the next big problem which will be heating.

Matt Millen

We have to focus back with our football team,

Kevin Garnett

We have no choice. We're in a position where we have to stop looking down the road and start to focus on one game at a time and getting better.

Bob Willis

We want our students to be able to focus on their futures when they graduate without being saddled with huge amounts of student loan debt.

Doug Snyder

We want him to be focused. We want him to focus on leading this team and helping his teammates in the postseason. We thought it was productive and fruitful.

Lance Traywick

We have a young team that is very inexperienced and at times when we don't throw strikes, their focus can wane from time to time.

Etsuko Yamashita

The CPI proved not so helpful for the yen's rises. The market is now shifting its focus to the policy meeting.

Carol Vorderman

I'm a bit frightened of the idea of a full facelift because, when you look in the mirror, you want to look like yourself.

Carol Vorderman

Most people have the wrong idea about me because I've been very private.

Carlos Mencia

Why are we rebuilding New Orleans? Whose idea was this, Aquaman?

Carlos Ghosn

People will always challenge you on an idea as long as it has not been concretized by somebody else.

Carlos Castaneda

It is important to have a perspective then only through seeing the world is it possible to transcend ideas such as the Flyers, and other aberrant thought forms. With ruthlessness, cunning patience and sweetness, it can be cracked.

Carl Bernstein

The American Revolution and Declaration of Independence, it has often been argued, were fueled by the most radical of all American political ideas.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

You have no idea, how much poetry there is in the calculation of a table of logarithms!

C. S. Lewis

You have no idea what an appetite it gives one, being executed.

C. S. Lewis

If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality.

Carol Shields

The recounting of a life is a cheat...even our own stories are obscenely distorted...

Carlos Fuentes

Writing is a struggle against silence.

Carlos Castaneda

What is a truthful life? A life lived with deliberateness, a good, strong life.

Carlos Castaneda

I'm never angry at anybody! No human being can do anything important enough for that. You get angry at people when you feel that their acts are important. I don't feel that way any longer.

Carlos Castaneda

Burn your bridges every 2 years.

Carlos Castaneda

One ,must have something to die for in order to have something to live for

Carlos Castaneda

For me the world is weird because it is stupendous, awesome, mysterious, unfathomable; my interest has been to convince you that you must assume responsibility for being here, in this marvelous world, in this marvelous desert, in this marvelous time. I want to convince you that you must learn to make every act count, since you are going to be here for only a short while, in fact, too short for witnessing all the marvels of it.

C. S. Lewis

Bridge-players tell me that there must be some money on the game 'or else people won't take it seriously'. Apparently it's like that. Your bid - for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity - will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high, until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world.

Agnes de Mille

Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.

Jill Soloway

I'm a naturally open person - some might say radically open.

Jonathan Ive

It's difficult to do something radically new, unless you are at the heart of a company.

Carlos Mesa

We must create a state that responds to the citizens' needs, and we need citizens who feel committed to their state because that state serves the citizens.

Eric Lindros

I think so. We'll see how it responds (to Monday's practice), but right now I think so.

Mark Noll

When I'm thinking like a historian, I tend to be a little depressed. But when I'm thinking like a Christian, I tend to be optimistic.

John Updike

A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise.

John Updike

The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific.

Laila Robins

A lot of times you come against actors who come from a different direction, and you tend to meet in the middle.

James Salter

West Pointers tend to be rigorously honest - more than necessary, in my view.

Nina Hoss

In Germany, actors tend to be more laid-back and take orders from the director: 'Tell me what you want.' I'm more into collaboration. So are Americans.

Laurie Helgoe

I am very troubled by the tendency to define introverts by what they lack. Introversion is a preference, not a fallback plan.

Timothy Noah

Moderates tend more than ideologues to be other-directed types who respond to external pressure.

Andy Serkis

When we, as humans, articulate, our tongues tend to hit the back of the teeth.