Reading Truman Quotes & Sayings

Since each story presents its own technical problems, obviously one can't generalize about them on a two-times-two-equals-four basis. Finding the right form for your story is simply to realize the most natural way of telling the story. The test of whether or not a writer has defined the natural shape of his story is just this: After reading it, can you imagine it differently, or does it silence your imagination and seem to you absolute and final? As an orange is final. As an orange is something nature has made just right. — Truman Capote

I could wade into this river, let my sins drown to the bottom, let the waters carry me someplace far. — Khaled Hosseini

Venezuelans have a deep democratic conviction. If the government hotheads ventured out to stir violence they would encounter the armed forces. I don't believe the armed forces respond to a political party. — Henrique Capriles Radonski

It's not the time we spend but how we spend the time that truly tells our story. — Tonya Hurley

Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers. — Harry Truman

Look back. Look back at me.
Richard Armitage spoke this line in the movie North and South as he watched Miss Hale drive away in a carriage. — Elizabeth Gaskell

In reading the lives of great men, I found that the first victory they won was over themselves ... self-discipline with all of them came first. — Harry Truman

And there was no entertainment for them at night. They were too poor to own a television set. But they seemed content. Truman with his sculpting and building the recreation center. Lynne writing poems occasionally, reading them to her friends, then tearing them up. — Alice Walker

One cannot be taught to write. One can only learn to write by writing - and reading. Reading good books written by real artists - until you understand why they are good. — Truman Capote

What was most striking about the long course of human events, Truman had concluded from his reading of history, were its elements of continuity, including, above all, human nature, which had changed little if at all through time. "The only new thing in the world is the history you don't know," he would one day tell an interviewer. — David McCullough

Harper Lee and Truman Capote became friends as next-door neighbors in the late 1920s, when they were about kindergarten age. From the start, they recognized in each other "an apartness," as Capote later expressed it; and both loved reading. When Lee's father gave them an old Underwood typewriter, they began writing original stories together. — Charles J. Shields

My preferred pastimes are conversation, reading, travel and writing, in that order. — Truman Capote

I hate leaving home. I love what I do, but I'd love to go home every night. — Charlie Watts

A society person who is enthusiastic about modern painting or Truman Capote is already half a traitor to his class. It is middle-class people who, quite mistakenly, imagine that a lively pursuit of the latest in reading and painting will advance their status in the world. — Mary McCarthy

I'm not one to insist that a man can't possibly make it without a lot of formal education, since my own formal education pretty much stopped when I graduated from Independence High School in 1901. And then there was a twenty-two-year gap, while I worked on a farm and as a railroad timekeeper and served in the Army and did a lot of other things, before I started to attend night classes at Kansas City Law School - and I left there in 1925 and never got a degree. But I've tried to increase my knowledge all my life by reading and reading and reading, — Harry Truman

But if Miss Golightly remained unconscious of my existence, except as a doorbell convenience, I became, through the summer, rather an authority on hers. I discovered, from observing the trash-basket outside her door, that her regular reading consisted of tabloids and travel folders and astrological charts; that she smoked an esoteric cigarette called Picayunes; survived on cottage cheese and Melba Toast; that her vari-colored hair was somewhat self-induced. The same source made it evident that she received V-letters by the bale. They were torn into strips like bookmarks. I used occasionally to pluck myself a bookmark in passing. Remember and miss you and rain and please write and damn and goddamn were the words that recurred most often on these slips; those, and lonesome and love. — Truman Capote

Reading dreams. That's what started her walking down the road. Every day she'd walk a little further: a mile, and come home. Two miles, and come home. One day she just kept on. — Truman Capote

Something I chose to forget because it didn't fit in with how shit everything was. — Patrick Ness

Dyslexia lends itself to original thinking, not rote formulas, because you can't do the formulas - you think up your own method based on intuition and instincts. Creativity is trial and error, trying to figure out a way to do something emotionally and intuitively. — Philip Schultz

When a man says he had pleasure with a woman he does not mean conversation. — Samuel Johnson

It was the family tradition. I wanted to live up to the name-McNair. — Steve McNair