Pithier Quotes & Sayings

Still. Four words.
And I didn't realize it until a couple of days ago, when someone wrote in to my blog:
Dear Neil,
If you could choose a quote - either by you or another author - to be inscribed on the wall of a public library children's area, what would it be?
Thanks!
Lynn
I pondered a bit. I'd said a lot about books and kids' reading over the years, and other people had said things pithier and wiser than I ever could. And then it hit me, and this is what I wrote:
I'm not sure I'd put a quote up, if it was me, and I had a library wall to deface. I think I'd just remind people of the power of stories, and why they exist in the first place. I'd put up the four words that anyone telling a story wants to hear. The ones that show that it's working, and that pages will be turned:
... and then what happened? — Neil Gaiman

I remember everything What have I become? My sweetest friend? E veryone I know goes away in the end You could have it all My empire of dirt I will let you down I will make you hurt. — Johnny Cash

I get so carried away in interviews and deliver 1,500-word treatises, then find it's been reduced to something pithier but also not quite accurate. Although I imagine there are people I work with who wish they could edit me every day. — Bertie Carvel

You can't expect everything to happen all at once when it's been such a male-dominated world for so long. — Reed Morano

I do believe that Instagram has put a stake in the ground and we're growing more quickly than anyone. Is there something in there we could do to make it a multi-billion dollar business? I think we can figure out something along the way. — Kevin Systrom

[ ... ] to be absolutely modern means: never to question the content of modernity and to serve it as one serves the absolute, that is, without hesitation. — Milan Kundera

Thera started sputtering. "You fool. You idiot." She stopped because Blaethe's response was much pithier and far more creative. She nodded approvingly. "What he said. — Anne Bishop

The music has always been my bread and butter, and I've focused more of my attention on that. — Al Yankovic

I threw it down the air shaft. There's a concrete floor below. — Ayn Rand

god, love is more strange than numerals more strange than grass on fire more strange than the dead body of a child drowned in the bottom of a tub, we know so little, we know so much, we don't know enough. — Charles Bukowski

A film that is bleached tends to have a more realistic quality. — Lasse Hallstrom