People Who Wrote Quotes & Sayings

My musical heroes are people like Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie who wrote and sang real songs for real people; for everyone, old, young, and in between. — Tom Chapin

Morals are meant to be shared." He held me away for another moment, reading, then grinned and handed me the book. "I like this one."
... "It's better to love people than wealth. I love Dad, Mom, Kendall, Sandra, Nick, baby Stetson, and especially Hudson. I wouldn't trade them for a mountain of gold."
"I love the word 'especially,'" he said. "And I love the person who wrote it." Then he bent over to kiss me. — Janette Rallison

I've actually always started with what feels most natural. Which is, the people who surround me in my daily life. So, the first show I ever wrote, which is called 'Surface Transit,' was based in part on people I knew from my family. Co-workers, ex-boyfriends. All of that kind of thing. — Sarah Jones

I am a Veteran, as are most of my personal friends. A Veteran is someone, who at one point in their life, wrote a blank check payable to the United States of America for an amount up to, and including, their life. Regardless of personal or political views, there are way too many people in this country who no longer remember that fact ... — Jose N. Harris

Blues purists never cared for me. I don't worry about it. I think if it this way: When I made 'Three O' Clock Blues,' they were not there. The people out there made the tune. And blues purists just wrote about it. The people is who I'm trying to satisfy. — B.B. King

Many pundits today are in the habit of misquoting Santayana's epigram, Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Maybe some people have come to grief this way, but they are probably fewer than those who have fallen into the opposite error. One is apt to perish in politics from too much memory, Tocqueville wrote somewhere, with equal truth and greater insight. — David Hackett Fischer

When I was young," wrote Jim, "my ambition was to be one of the people who makes a difference in this world. My hope still is to leave this world a little bit better for my being here."

And he did. — Brian Jay Jones

And a keen jealousy invades me, not of other people, but of that me made of ink and periods and commas, who wrote the novels I will write no more, the author who continues to enter the privacy of this young woman, while I, I here and now, with the physical energy I feel surging, much more reliable than the creative impulse, I am separated from her by the immense distance of a keyboard and a white page on the roller. — Italo Calvino

I had a friend who worked at a hospice, and he said people in their final moments don't discuss their successes, awards or what books they wrote or what they accomplished. They only talk about their loves and their regrets, and I think that's very telling. — Brad Pitt

The people who carried the Catholic faith forward in history, who made the culture of beauty, music, art, and architecture rooted in the Christian understanding of God and humanity - these generations were taught, spiritually fed, and shaped by priests exactly like the men who minister to us in our local Church, men not so different from the one who wrote this book. — Paul Scalia

My first novel - the novel I wrote before 'Midnight's Children' - feels, to me, now, very - I mean, I get embarrassed when I see people reading it. You know, there are some people who, bizarrely, like it. Which I'm, you know, I'm happy for. — Salman Rushdie

Sometimes I need to reject the music proposed for my songs because the musicians misunderstand that the Fanny Crosby who once wrote for the people in the saloons has merely changed the lyrics. Oh my no. The church must never sing it's songs to the melodies of the world. — Fanny Crosby

Our teacher made us write a story about what we want to be when we're big," Noah tells him.
"What did you write?"
"I wrote that I wanted to concentrate on being little first."
"That's a very good answer."
"Isn't it? I would rather be old than a grown-up. All grown-ups are angry, it's just children and old people who laugh."
"Did you write that?"
"Yes."
"What did your teacher say?"
"She said I hadn't understood the task."
"And what did you say?"
"I said she hadn't understood my answer. — Fredrik Backman

What happens to the people who became writers because yakking and tweeting and bragging felt to them like intolerably shallow forms of social engagement? What happens to the people who want to communicate in depth, individual to individual, in the quiet and permanence of the printed word, and who were shaped by their love of writers who wrote when publication still assured some kind of quality control and literary reputations were more than a matter of self-promotional decibel levels? — Jonathan Franzen

I have such an admiration for John [Lennon], like most people.
But to be the guy who wrote with him, well that's enough. Right
there you could retire and go, 'Jesus I had a fantastic life. Take me, Lord.' — Paul McCartney

I had an instinctive feeling that the people who have little or no school training should have something coming into their homes weekly which dealt with their problems in a simple, helpful way ... so I wrote in a plain, common-sense way on the things that concerned our people. — Ida B. Wells

And I thought about how many people have loved those songs. And how many people got through a lot of bad times because of those songs. And how many people enjoyed good times with those songs. And how much those songs really mean. I think it would be great to have written one of those songs. I bet if I wrote one of them, I would be very proud. I hope the people who wrote those songs are happy. I hope they feel it's enough. I really do because they've made me happy. And I'm only one person. — Stephen Chbosky

I'm proud of it. Apart from marking the first occasion when I used my talent on behalf of other people without being asked and without caring whether I was rewarded
which was a major breakthrough in itself
the job was a pure masterpiece. Working on it, I realized in my guts how an artist or an author can get high on the creative act. The poker who wrote Precipice's original tapeworm was pretty good, but you could theoretically have killed it without shutting down the net
that is, at the cost of losing thirty or forty billion bits of data. Which I gather they were just about prepared to do when I showed up. But mine ... Ho, no! That, I cross my heart, cannot be killed without DISMANTLING the net. — John Brunner

I have a folder that's labeled "The Folder of 24." Inside it are letters from twenty-four people who were actively in the process of planning their suicide, but who stopped and got help - not because of what I wrote on my blog, but because of the amazing response from the community of people who read it and said, "Me too." They were saved by the people who wrote about losing their mother or father or child to suicide and how they'd do anything to go back and convince them not to believe the lies mental illness tells you. They were saved by the people who offered up encouragement and songs and lyrics and poems and talismans and mantras that worked for them and that might work for a stranger in need. There are twenty-four people alive today who are still here because people were brave enough to talk about their struggles, or compassionate enough to convince others of their worth, or who simply said, "I don't understand your illness, but I know that the world is better with you in it. — Jenny Lawson

There are so many people who have lived and died before you. You will never have a new problem; you're not going to ever have a new problem. Somebody wrote the answer down in a book somewhere. — Will Smith

Writing's much more romantic when its pen and ink and paper. It's... More timeless. and worthwhile. Think about it. There are so many words gushing out into the universe these days. All digitally. All in Comic Sans or Times New Roman. Silly Websites. Stupid news stories digitally uploaded to a 24-hour channel. Where's all this writing going? Who's keeping a note of it all? Who's in charge of deciding what's worthwhile and what isn't? But back then... Back then, if someone wanted to write something they had to buy paper. Buy it! And ink. And a pen. And they couldn't waste too many sheets cos it was expensive. So when people wrote, they wrote because it was worthwhile... not just because they had some half-baked idea and they wanted to pointlessly prove their existence by sharing it on some bloody social networking site. — Holly Bourne

I seem to be one of the few people in journalism who never worked or wrote for the 'Boston Phoenix.' I certainly read and admired it, and feel the same general malaise at news that it is gone. — James Fallows

When I was very little, say five or six, I became aware of the fact that people wrote books. Before that, I thought that God wrote books. I thought a book was a manifestation of nature, like a tree. When my mother explained it, I kept after her: What are you saying? What do you mean? I couldn't believe it. It was astonishing. It was like
here's the man who makes all the trees. Then I wanted to be a writer, because, I suppose, it seemed the closest thing to being God. — Fran Lebowitz

People think they know me from my songs. But my repertoire of songs is so wide-ranging that you'd have to be a madman to figure out the characteristics of the person who wrote all those songs. — Bob Dylan

I hate America. I hate this country. It's just big ideas, and stories, and people dying, and people like you. The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word 'free' to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me. You come to room 1013 over at the hospital, I'll show you America. Terminal, crazy and mean. I live in America, that's hard enough, I don't have to love it. You do that. Everybody's got to love something. — Tony Kushner

It takes brains not to make money," Colonel Cargill wrote in one of the homiletic memoranda he regularly prepared for circulation over General Peckem's signature. "Any fool can make money these days and most of them do. But what about people with talent and brains? Name, for example, one poet who makes money. — Joseph Heller

I know people who have written big hit country songs that are really kind of terrible songs, but for the rest of their life, they're the guy who wrote that. You've got to be careful; if you don't want that to happen, don't write those songs. — Jason Isbell

Tell me. You're a man who understands history," I said. "If you want to start a revolution, why not issue a manifesto? Why not show the people who you are, what you're doing?"
He leaned back, grateful to explain. "That's perfectly understandable. Socrates wrote nothing down. Neither did Jesus. The problem with text is that it assumes it's own reality. It cannot answer, and it cannot explain. — Nicholas Shakespeare

One of the most terrifying aspects of publishing stories and books is the realization that they are going to be read, and read by strangers. I had never fully realized this before, although I had of course in my imagination dwelt lovingly upon the thought of the millions and millions of people who were going to be uplifted and enriched and delighted by the stories I wrote. — Shirley Jackson

In 56 A.D. [the apostle] Paul wrote that over 500 people had seen the risen Jesus and that most of them were still alive (1 Corinthians 15:6ff.). It passes the bounds of credibility that the early Christians could have manufactured such a tale and then preached it among those who might easily have refuted it simply by producing the body of Jesus. — John Warwick Montgomery

I think most writers ... write about episodes meaningful to them in terms of their own imaginations. Now that would include a great deal of what they experience, but I'm not sure there's an autobiographical intention. ... I believe I'm telling the truth when I say that, when I wrote Catch-22, I was not particularly interested in war; I was mainly interested in writing a novel, and that was a subject for it. That's been true of all my books. Now what goes into these books does reflect a great deal of my more morbid nature - the fear of dying, a great deal of social awareness and social protest, which is part of my personality. None of that is the objective of writing. Take five writers who have experienced the same thing, and they will be completely different as people, and they'd be completely different in what they do write, what they're able to write. — Joseph Heller

On June 22, 1793, Vancouver's Discovery and Chatham anchored in Klekane Inlet. Archibald Menzies, the ship's botanist, wrote that on the evening of June 28, they were visited by eight natives in two canoes who brought them two large salmon. This is the first known published encounter with the Haisla people. — Eden Robinson

Great dad. Yeah, he would ask me for money on birthdays and, you know, inappropriate times. And I just wrote him off like, 'You're not a father.' I just learned you cannot emotionally invest in people who are not attainable. — Drew Barrymore

But we are the same, yes, but were not. We are three completely different people, we play three completely different instruments and all epically fail when trying to play each other's" he said as Daniel and I nodded slowly. That was far to true. "I wrote this piece because I love that these three instruments that make three different sounds, are played three different ways and look different, can create such a beautiful harmony if they're played correctly" he swallowed again then looked at Daniel and I "And I think although we are three different people, who - usually - look different, and who come out with three different kinds of ridiculous-ness" he said and we both laughed "If we come together we work perfectly with each other and can in some senses create a beautiful harmony — R.J. Seeley

Well, people have been wondering what's going to happen to the novel for two hundred years; its death has been announced many times. You know, I think the novel keeps redefining the world we live in. What you should look for in a novel is a window nobody else is looking out of, that nobody else can look through. What you look for is a voice. You pick up a novel by someone such as Faulkner or Hemingway and you just read three pages and you know who wrote it. And that's what one should demand of a novelist. — Mordecai Richler

I wrote these letters in the mornings before work, in the library, during my sessions of prolonged loitering in Commons, where I remained every evening until asked to leave by the janitor. It seemed my whole life was composed of these disjointed fractions of time, hanging around in one public place and then another, as if I were waiting for trains that never came. And, like one of those ghosts who are said to linger around depots late at night, asking passersby for the timetable of the Midnight Express that derailed twenty years before, I wandered from light to light until that dreaded hour when all the doors closed and, stepping from the world of warmth and people and conversation overheard, I felt the old familiar cold twist through my bones again and then it was all forgotten, the warmth, the lights; I had never been warm in my life, ever. — Donna Tartt

So this guy, Jeff Johnson, who is an accountant who cares nothing at all about a free press and cares nothing about journalism, he's a right winger who supported the war, you know, who two years ago told people he couldn't stand a word that I wrote. — Robert Scheer

Leanoardo wrote that a painter should begin every canvas wit a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light. Most painters do the opposite, starting with a whitewash and adding the shadows last. But Paul, who knows Leonardo so well you'd thing the old man slept on the bottom bun, understands the value of starting with the shadows. The only things people can ever know about you are the ones you let them see. — Ian Caldwell

People who succeed do not expect every company to reward fairly; they screen for companies that will recognize their contribution," wrote Warren Farrell, Ph.D. in The Myth of Male Power.2 — Suzanne Venker

I see my life flashing before me when I see people in the audience singing along to something I wrote in the '80s, and they're maybe standing next to someone who knows the more recent stuff. — Dave Pirner

There was a woman on the radio the other day who had wrote a book about how difficult it was in meetings once you're a working mother. She was like 'Oh, You have baby sick on your business suit'. Most people don't have a bloody business suit!!! — Alice Nutter

Of all my films, people wrote to me most about this one ... I had wanted to make The Idiot long before Rashomon. Since I was little I've liked Russian literature, but I find that I like Dostoevsky the best and had long thought that this book would make a wonderful film. He is still my favourite author, and he is the one - I still think - who writes most honestly about human existence. — Akira Kurosawa

After reading about ten of those self-help books, I saw that they were leading nowhere. They have an immediate effect, but that effect stops as soon as I close the book. They're just words, describing an ideal world that doesn't exist, not even for the people who wrote them. — Paulo Coelho

Robert Bork, at opening of Judiciary hearings:
How should a judge go about finding the law? The only legitimate way, in my opinion, is by attempting to discern what those who made the law intended ...
As I wrote in an opinion for our court, the judge's responsibility is to discern how the framers' values, defined in the context of the world they knew, apply in the world we know.
If a judge abandons intentions as his guide, there is no law available to him, and he begins to legislate a social agenda for the American people. That goes well beyond his powers.. — Joe Biden

I think I'm one of those guys who was sort of always in comedy. I thought of myself - and other people seemed to think of me - as funny from a very young age. I was a very young comedy nerd and I even did sketch comedy in high school and college. I wrote and shot sketches on video and acted in them. — Andy Daly

Songwriters I've always been drawn to are people who deal with something of depth in the lyric writing ... I've always been influenced by the folk song, the storytelling tradition in folk music. And so for years I wrote mostly story songs. I still do that, but as I've gone on, it's gotten a little more personal. I used to write mostly in the third person. I write a little more in the first person now. — Bruce Hornsby

The Bible is not absurd for the people who wrote it; it becomes absurd when people in our day insist on taking it literally. The Bible does not present us with material that is ridiculous in the context from which it came. The Bible springs from the context in which people then were thinking, searching, and trying to find answers . — Robert Alley

Until I was about 7, I thought books were just there, like trees. When I learned that people actually wrote them, I wanted to, too, because all children aspire to inhuman feats like flying. Most people grow up to realize they can't fly. Writers are people who don't grow up to realize they can't be God. — Fran Lebowitz

In American terms, the accomplishment of Genghis Khan might be understood if the United States, instead of being created by a group of educated merchants or wealthy planters, had been founded by one of its illiterate slaves, who, by sheer force of personality, charisma, and determination, liberated America from foreign rule, united the people, created an alphabet, wrote the constitution, established universal religious freedom, invented a new system of warfare, marched an army from Canada to Brazil, and opened roads of commerce in a free-trade zone that stretched across the continents. — Jack Weatherford

The very paradigm of revolution, of right versus wrong, good versus bad, is a relic with no bearing on the present. Yet artists, exhibitions, and curators valorize the sixties. People who wrote about these artists 30 years ago still write about them in the same ways, often for the same magazines. — Jerry Saltz

How does a person please God? Many religions teach that one must appease God/gods with offerings or superstitious rituals. Yet God's story abolishes our religious to-do lists. Faith in Jesus is God's way for us, and delight in Jesus is what God asks of us. When religious people become followers of Jesus, they are freed from sin and legalistic rituals. The Christians in Galatia were coming under the influence of Jewish Christians who believed that a number of the ceremonial practices of Judaism remained obligatory for followers of Jesus. Paul wrote to the churches in this part of Asia Minor to warn them that they were in reality deserting God and turning to a false gospel. He forcefully proclaimed that people cannot be saved by performing good works in general or by adhering to the Law of Moses in particular. We must come to God trusting in Jesus alone. Only then will we experience freedom. — Anonymous

Jason Rezaian is coming home. A courageous journalist for The Washington Post who wrote about the daily lives and hopes of the Iranian people, he's been held for a year and a half. He embodies the brave spirit that gives life to the freedom of the press. Jason has already been reunited with his wife and mom. — Barack Obama

I can count on one hand the number of people who wrote me a thank you letter after having an interview, and I gave almost all of them a job. — Kate Reardon

I wrote about people who liked fake fireplaces in their parlor, who thought a brass horse with a clock embedded in its flank was wonderful. — Betty Smith

Well, it would be helpful to not have to go through all of these in Braille," the man said. "I'm looking for the local wildlife guide and one other book." He held a paper out in front of him, and she took it. "The head librarian wrote the authors' names down for me," the man said, grinning. "I don't think she realized I couldn't read it." "That would be my boss," Julia sighed. "She's ... she's the kind of person who yells at deaf people. — Aubrey Rose

The majority of any society comprised, Smith knew, not landlords or merchants, but "servants, laborers, and workmen of different kinds," who derived their income from wages. Their welfare was the prime concern of economic policy, as Smith conceived it. "No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable," he wrote. "It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe and lodge the whole body of the people should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged." The chief economic concern of the legislator, in Smith's view, ought to be the purchasing power of wages, since that was the measure of the material well-being of the bulk of the population. (p. 64) — Jerry Z. Muller

Hey, Arnold," he said. I looked up 'in love with a white girl' on Google and found and article about that white girl named Cynthia who disappeared in Mexico last summer. You remember how her face was all over the papers and everybody said it was such a sad thing?"
"I kinda remember," I said.
"Well this article said that over two hundred Mexican girls have disappeared in the last three years in that same part of the country. And nobody says much about that. And that's racist. The guy who wrote the article says people care more about beautiful white girls than they do about everybody else on the planet. White girls are privileged. They're damsels in distress."
So what does that mean?" I asked.
"I think it means you're just a racist asshole like everybody else. — Sherman Alexie

There are people, she once wrote, who think that we cannot rule ourselves because the few times we tried, we failed, as if all the others who rule themselves today got it right the first time. It is like telling a crawling baby who tries to walk, and then falls back on his buttocks, to stay there. As if the adults walking past him did not all crawl, once. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I wrote about real people and real circumstances and real neighborhoods. There was no crypt or castles or H.P. Lovecraft-type environments. They were just about normal people who had something bizarre happening to them in the neighborhood. — Richard Matheson

People who run for office and are defeated aren't rejected in the usual sense of the word. They're just defeated because they couldn't get enough votes that one time. It doesn't mean the public despises them. It's a preference for somebody else for that particular office at that particular moment, that's all. The examples I've given have shown that when those men were passed up, they were still highly thought of and were still great men. There were a good many like that. You take the Adams family. After John Quincy Adams passed on, there were Adams descendants in Lincoln's cabinet. They wrote important histories and things of that kind. Even in the states, some good men are governors who have been defeated previously in elections, even in previous tries for governor. If they don't become pessimists and decide to lay down and take it, if they get up and start over again, why, they don't have any trouble. — Harry Truman

I wrote 'The Facebook Era' because I felt like it needed to be written, and I was one of the people who might be qualified to do so. Specifically, my background is that I developed the first business application on Facebook. — Clara Shih

I maintain that some Jew wrote it who probably heard about Christian people but never encountered any. — Martin Luther

Jobs, who could identify with each of those sentiments, wrote some of the lines himself, including "They push the human race forward." By the time of the Boston Macworld in early August, they had produced a rough version. They agreed it was not ready, but Jobs used the concepts, and the "think different" phrase, in his keynote speech there. "There's a germ of a brilliant idea there," he said at the time. "Apple is about people who think outside the box, who want to use computers to help them change the world." They debated the grammatical issue: If "different" was supposed to modify the verb "think," it should be an adverb, as in "think differently." But Jobs insisted that he wanted "different" to be used as a noun, as in "think victory" or "think beauty." Also, it echoed colloquial use, as in "think big. — Walter Isaacson

There are words that I wouldn't say because they hurt people's feelings. I just happen to be a white guy who writes for a lot of black comedians but if I wrote for a lot of gay comedians there might be stuff I would say then. — Neal Brennan

God made them, wrote one man who said his son was homosexual. They did not choose their status. ... It is not a medical matter. ... You know there are quite as many people among them as among your so called 'normal.' ... Let your campagin remove the penal laws which make these 'diseased' people a prey for mackmailers. Give them recognition and let them live their lives.' — George Chauncey

Being a bestseller doesnt mean they wrote a great book. Just means they knew a lot of people who would buy it. — David A. Santos

Is commonplace today to find large groups of people who believe the government has a responsibility to take care of all the basic necessities of its citizens. Benjamin Franklin, however, wrote: To relieve the misfortunes of our fellow creatures is concurring with the Deity; it is godlike; but, if we provide encouragement for laziness, and supports for folly, may we not be found fighting against the order of God and nature, which perhaps has appointed want and misery as the proper punishments for, and cautions against, as well as necessary consequences of, idleness and extravagance? Whenever we attempt to amend the scheme of Providence, and to interfere with the government of the world, we had need be very circumspect, lest we do more harm than good.3 — Ben Carson

In the Culture of Character, the ideal self was serious, disciplined, and honorable. What counted was not so much the impression one made in public as how one behaved in private. The word personality didn't exist in English until the eighteenth century, and the idea of "having a good personality" was not widespread until the twentieth. But when they embraced the Culture of Personality, Americans started to focus on how others perceived them. They became captivated by people who were bold and entertaining. "The social role demanded of all in the new Culture of Personality was that of a performer," Susman famously wrote. "Every American was to become a performing self. — Susan Cain

Los Angeles people are incapable of passively mainlining TV and movies. Here you have to read who produced or directed every episode, who wrote it, who had guests shots and whether you know them personally and if they like you. You have to figure out who everybody's agent is and whether yours is better. You not only know but deeply care about the difference between such job titles as Producer, Supervising Producer, and Executive Story Editor ... So while the rest of the country is lying stupid in a media-induced coma, people in L.A. are in constant withdrawal. — Cynthia Heimel

His courtesy was somewhat extravagant. He would write and thank people who wrote to thank him for wedding presents and when he encountered anyone as punctilious as himself the correspondence ended only with death. — Evelyn Waugh

Pound was silly, bumptious, extravagantly generous, annoying, exhibitionistic; Eliot was sensible, cautious, retiring, soothing, shy. Though Pound wrote some brilliant passages, on the whole he was a failure as a poet (sometimes even in his own estimation); Eliot went from success to success and is still quoted
and misquoted
by thousands of people who have never read him. Both men were expatriates by choice, but Eliot renounced his American citizenship and did his best to become assimilated with his fellow British subjects, while Pound always remained an American in exile. — T.S. Mathews

I wrote these two songs ["Coming Out of the Dark" and "Always Tomorrow"] as a celebration of hope. And, I want to send it out to all of those people who are suffering through this terrible disaster [Hurricane Katrina], and please know that you are not alone
and you will not be. — Gloria Estefan

The secret to success: Don't stop to admire yourself too often. I only stopped to admire my work after I wrote eight books, before that, I never once admired myself for accomplishing anything in my profession. Don't stop to admire yourself too much, instead, admire people who have achieved more than you have, because that gives you something to keep on looking forward to. But when the time comes that you should take a look at the greatness you have done, make sure you take a really long and hard good look at it! Make sure you know your own greatness. — C. JoyBell C.

I would turn the question around to people, especially those reporters who wrote some of those articles. Are you advocating our daughters shouldn't learn self-defense? Because that's what was taught at that rally. — Matt Shea

Can't quite believe it after being so used to being musically invisible for so long. It makes me feel very warm to know that people who are the same age as I was when I wrote those songs understand them for what they were and find something in them. — Vashti Bunyan

Of all the paradoxes of Lincoln's life, none is more powerful than the fact that the man who would come to be known throughout the world - from American schoolrooms to the tribal councils of the Caucasus Mountains - was deeply mysterious to the people who knew him best. "Those who have spoken most confidently of their knowledge of his personal qualities," wrote the Pennsylvania Republican Alexander McClure, "are, as a rule, those who saw least of them below the surface. — Joshua Wolf Shenk

By denying people's sense of visual beauty in painting and sculpture , melody in music , meter and rhyme in poetry , plot and narrative and character in fiction , the elite arts wrote off the vast majority of their audience . They purposely excluded people who approach art in part for pleasure and edification in favour of social one-upmanship and an ever-narrowing, in-crowd elite. — Steven Pinker

The reason Dick's physics was so hard for ordinary people to grasp was that he did not use equations. The usual theoretical physics was done since the time of Newton was to begin by writing down some equations and then to work hard calculating solutions of the equations. This was the way Hans and Oppy and Julian Schwinger did physics. Dick just wrote down the solutions out of his head without ever writing down the equations. He had a physical picture of the way things happen, and the picture gave him the solutions directly with a minimum of calculation. It was no wonder that people who had spent their lives solving equations were baffled by him. Their minds were analytical; his was pictorial. — Freeman Dyson

I'm an actor who they said was wrinkled and balding and everything else when I was in my early 30's. Most of the people who wrote that who thought they were younger than me are now bald and wrinkled. — Jack Nicholson

You're not allowed to park a truck in your driveway. You're not allowed to work on your house on Sunday. The people who enforce these laws are nuts. After I wrote a column on this, I got I don't know how many letters from Coral Gables homeowners, story after story after story, wonderfully horrible stories. And the venom they felt for their own government! — Dave Barry

The situation of the Old Left was the theory of Socialist Realism, etc. It seemed pointless to argue. We stayed carefully away from people who wrote for the New Masses. — George Oppen

No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited; the words "no" and "not" employed in restraint of government power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the Constitution and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights. — Edmund A. Opitz

None of the people who wrote Obamacare want anything to do with it. None of the people responsible for Obamacare can afford it. They all want subsidies. None of the people that gave us Obamacare have any desire to actually go to HealthCare.gov and sign up. That's for you and me to have to do. — Rush Limbaugh

Sometimes, what people choose to write down on paper is more important than what they say.
Caleb didn't know what Sarah meant. But I knew. I wrote in my journal every night. And when I read what I had written, I could see myself there, clearer than when I looked in the mirror. I could see all of us: Papa, who couldn't always say the things he felt; Caleb, who said everything; and Sarah, who didn't know that she had changed us all. — Patricia MacLachlan

One wouldn't want to say that what makes a good writer is the number of books that the writer wrote because you could write a whole number of bad books. Books that don't work, mediocre books, or there's a whole bunch of people in the pulp tradition who have done that. They just wrote ... and actually they didn't write a whole bunch of books, they just wrote one book many times. — Walter Mosley

That's your name, isn't it? You aren't the man who wrote the logbook. You're not the hero that was sent to protect the people ... you're his servant. The packman who hated him. She — Brandon Sanderson

The whole idea of WHAT HAPPENED WAS ... is not about dating. It is more about people who are not committed to who they are or are indifferent about their life in general, which is how I felt about myself when I wrote it. I had turned 40 and I was unhappy and I wanted to write about that. Dating just became the framework ... I like all those fringy, weird, nonverbal, quiet, tiny little things, those powerful interchanges between people, things that go unsaid, that people know are happening all the time but nobody wants to talk about. That's what I want to make movies about. — Tom Noonan

Thomas Kelly wrote, We feel honestly the pull of many obligations and try to fulfill them all. And we are unhappy, uneasy, strained, oppressed, and fearful we shall be shallow ... We have hints that there is a way of life vastly richer and deeper than all this hurried existence, a life of unhurried serenity and peace and power. If only we could slip over into that Center! ... We have seen and known some people who have found this deep Center of living, where the fretful calls of life are integrated, where No as well as Yes can be said with confidence. — John Ortberg

I'm not even the coolest one of my friends. I'm just the guy who sat down and wrote everything down. Like I know plenty of people who do crazier stuff than I do. — Tucker Max

Her essay about the wedding ring was short. Kerr wrote: "Things are just things - they have no power to hurt or to heal. Only people can do that. And we can all choose whether to be hurt or healed by the people who love us."
That was all.
And that was everything. — Jack Canfield

I'm the one who often makes the 'Murder, She Wrote' reference, and ABC hates that, they don't want me to do that. And I say that having never actually watched 'Murder, She Wrote'. I think people have been trying to compare it to crime shows that are on right now, and all I can do is listen. I don't watch a lot of TV. — Nathan Fillion

It is pretended that, as in the Preamble to the Constitution, it is "we the people" who wrote that document, rather than fifty-five privileged white males whose class interest required a strong central government. That use of government for class purposes, to serve the needs of the wealthy and powerful, has continued throughout American history, down to the present day. It is disguised by language that suggests all of us - rich and poor and middle class - have a common interest. — Howard Zinn

Fear never wrote a symphony or poem, negotiated a peace treaty, or cured a disease. Fear never pulled a family out of poverty or a country out of bigotry. Fear never saved a marriage or a business. Courage did that. Faith did that. People who refused to consult or cower to their timidities did that. But fear itself? Fear herds us into a prison and slams the doors. Wouldn't it be great to walk out? — Max Lucado

People who wrote novels about universities hardly ever got them right. Max had spent his short working life untenured, but still he'd managed to be a charming magnet wherever he taught, and Amy had surfeited on faculty gossip and professorial antics and the general behavior of academics, who were as a whole no more brilliant or Machiavellian than travel agents. They tended toward shabbier clothes and manners, and of course there was the occasional storied eccentric or truly original mind, but most college campuses - especially the older ones - functioned less as brain trusts than as wildlife preserves, housing and protecting people who wouldn't last a week in GenPop. — Jincy Willett

In life, we are all on the same journey, we are all struggling to get from point A to point B. Different people have different point A originations and B destinations, but the path we travel is the same. If you can take what you have learned; share the experience and shortcuts you've discovered along the way, offer time saving tips and how you finally made it - then you can lighten the load of those who are just beginning on a similar path. Getting paid for it is an added bonus. My hope is that you do not end your journey at "I wrote a book" but rather understand that your book is just the beginning. Imagine the products you can create based on the contents of your book. Imagine the opportunities to share your knowledge with more people by speaking, training, coaching. You have an important message to share and the world is waiting ... — Kytka Hilmar-Jezek

To some extent this area was foreshadowed by pioneering humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow, who wrote about the self-actualized or fulfilled person, and Carl Rogers, who once noted that he was pessimistic about the world, but optimistic about people. — Tom Butler-Bowdon

There's nothing like privacy. You know, I like people. It's nice that they might like my books and all that ... but I'm not the book, see? I'm the guy who wrote it, but I don't want them to come up and throw roses on me or anything. I want them to let me breathe. — Charles Bukowski

Ritzonia" was the epithet coined by Bernard Bernson, who sold Italian pictures to American millionaires, to describe the unreal, mortifying sameness of their luxury. "Ritzonia," he wrote in 1909, "carries its inmates like a wishing carpet from place to place, the same people, the same meals, the same music. Within its walls you might be at Peking or Prague or Paris or London and you would never know where. — Richard Davenport-Hines

Washington never wrote an autobiography, and his diaries are largely confined to accounts of the weather and lists of the people who came to dinner. — Robert F. Dalzell Jr.

As a Persian scholar wrote, around 1115, "The people of China are the most skilfull of men in handicrafts. No other nation approaches them in this. The people of Rum (the Eastern Roman Empire) are highly proficient (in technology) too, but they do not reach the standards of the Chinese. The latter say that all men are blind in craftsmanship, except the men of Rum, who however are one-eyed, that is, they know only half the business. — Tonio Andrade