Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
So research is a terribly imperfect science, and you learn an awful lot more after you've published a book, because people keep writing to you and saying, 'Oh, gosh, I was related to such and such a character and I have a letter in my possession.'
My first girlfriend broke up with me on a yellow legal pad. After she picked me up from the airport one day, she took out a letter that her therapist wrote, and she read it to me. She and her therapists wrote a letter breaking up with me together.
St Paul, in his second letter to Corinth, spells this out further in the important eighth and ninth chapters, where he urges some of the Christian communities to be generous to others so that they may also have the chance to be generous in return.
The world is full of CEOs that think that just because they write a memo or they write a letter inside an annual report or they give a little video speech that gets sent around the company, they think that's what's really going to affect employees.
The publishers, as I remember at the very beginning of my career, wrote letters with their fountain pens. A letter is different from a phone call or fax. It's a different kind of intimacy. That pervaded the entire business of writing and publishing.
If you want to send a manuscript, send it to an agent. And send a letter first, asking permission. Launch it into the real world of cold-blooded commercial response, not into the fantasyland of wishful thinking, cowardice and surrender to Resistance.
Frequently you have a clash between the more sterile letter of the law and the justice that underlies it, and I think one of the things I've been trying more or less, where it was possible, is to go with the justice rather than the letter of the law.
'Forever Evil' is my love letter to DC super villains. It's my chance to take all of the villains I've worked with and all the ones I've never worked with and put them into one gigantic, epic story that will bring together the bads of the DC Universe.
A large part of the appeal of this novel when I was lucky enough to stumble across the story idea for 'A Head Full of Ghosts' was that I'd finally be writing a horror novel. In a lot of ways, the book is both my criticism of and love letter to horror.
The abortion cases produced an enormous amount of mail to my chambers, vastly more than to the other chambers, I am sure. I sometimes thought there wasn't a woman in the United States who didn't write me a letter on one side or the other of that issue.
My first serious attempts at writing were made in 1868, and I took up two very different lines of composition; I wrote some short stories of a very flimsy type, and also a work of a much more ambitious character, 'The Lives of the Black Letter Saints.'
Chew on this: Human teeth can detect a grain of sand or grit 10 microns in diameter. A micron is 1/25,000 of an inch. If you shrank a Coke can until it was the diameter of a human hair, the letter O in the product name would be about 10 microns across.
I firmly believe that the Constitution is the most powerful challenge to illiberal tendencies. If the Constitution is followed in letter and spirit and if the laws are made in the spirit in which Constitution was made, liberties can indeed be protected.
The U.S. is supposed to be a nation of second chances, but for the 70 million Americans with a criminal record, we're not doing such a great job. Even among those whose crimes were nonviolent and committed long ago, too many still bear a scarlet letter.
My friends all regarded me as a man of unsound mind because I held the view that my wife was with me in spirit always. I have lived with her spirit guiding me every day and she is with me now as I write this letter, and helps me to do as I am now doing.
The letter K was the first one in the alphabet which had not, with more or less justification, been used to designate other vitamins, and it also happened to be the first letter in the word 'koagulation' according to the Scandinavian and German spelling.
Red Letter Christians believe in the doctrines of the Apostle's Creed, are convinced that the Scriptures have been inspired by the Holy Spirit, and make having a personal transforming relationship with the resurrected Christ the touchtone of their faith.
Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook, it's so amazing because years ago, when I was growing up and watching movies, there was no way for us to interact with filmmakers at all. You could send a letter, and you'd never know if you were going to hear back or not.
I wanted to make a film about my dad, a sort of love letter, and explain what I understood of his cinema, which was so utopian. I also wanted to give the sense of his cinema, because they have never been very big box-office, but they were very influential.
A fan sent me a letter and a $10 bill. It's a short letter - all she said was, 'Hey, since it's harder for you to go out these days without getting photographed, here $10 for a pizza.' I was like, 'Aww, she sent me money for a pizza so I could eat at home!'
Well, I'm not going to go into what the letter says, because the police are looking at that. But as you say it's in Bahasa. But of course that's not to suggest that the letter came from outside of Australia. It came from in Australia. It came from Victoria.
My own interest in Kafka's letter came about when I was writing an article on Peter Ginz, the boy novelist held in Terezin, not far from Prague, and exterminated in Auschwitz by the Nazis. The Ginz family were from more or less the same milieu as the Kafkas.
When the first 'Hellboy' series came out, in the same batch of fan mail I got a letter from somebody from the Church of Satan, and I got a letter from a minister, and they both liked it. And I thought, 'What am I doing that I'm making both these guys happy?'
I wrote that letter, and the one to Nixon. And I wrote more letters, and I thought it might be a magazine article. At that time I sent it to Esquire and Playboy, but anyway, I kept writing, and all of sudden I had enough and thought, well maybe it is a book.
I remember one of my last shows, the Final Jeopardy! clue was something like 'These two boys' names are top 10 boys' names in the U.S., they both end with the same letter, and they're both names of Jesus' apostles.' Now, obviously that's not a knowable fact.
In the old days, people would pick up the phone and complain or they'd write a letter. But now they go to Ofcom and they must be sick to death of all of this. Any minor outrage that anyone's got, they go to Ofcom. They must be inundated with minor complaints.
Of all the things that the digital revolution has produced, once of the coolest, simplest ones is you can now contact people who write books that you read. You used to have to write a letter to the publisher and hope they passed it along, which they never did.
Harper Collins gave me a letter of intent saying that they want me to pen down my autobiography. When I was recollecting the incidents of my life for that, I selected only those incidents which were turning points in my life. I staged it instead of writing it.
There once was a time when employers could be reasonably certain that college graduates had a basic sense of the world and, as a minimum, could write a coherent business letter. That is simply no longer the case, as some academic leaders appear ready to admit.
I wrote a query letter to an editor - a friend of a friend. The editor called me an idiot, told me never to contact an editor directly, and then recommended three literary agents he had worked with before. Laurie Fox was one of them, and I've never looked back.
Back channels themselves are as old as American diplomacy. Thomas Jefferson was an early enthusiast - he often routed around his secretary of state, once sending a secret letter to the American envoy in France, Robert Livingston, that contained a coded message.
If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda, you're simply using a pen to record what you have thought out. In a poem, the pen is more like a flashlight, a Geiger counter, or one of those metal detectors that people walk around beaches with.
Russian is such a tough and complex language that I am happy enough to understand everything and read most things pretty well, but, without constant practice, my speech is not what I wish it was, and I would sooner write in crayon than write a letter in Russian.
What had brought me to New York in the autumn of 1972 was a letter of recommendation written by Norman Mailer, the author of 'The Naked and the Dead' and American literature's leading heavyweight contender, to Dan Wolf, the delphic editor of 'The Village Voice.'
The story wrote quickly. I called it 'Where You're From,' and I sent it out, as I had numerous other stories over the years. Except this time I got a letter back saying that it would be published. Someone out there had liked the story. I was thirty-one years old.
My writing partner, Nicki, and I became obsessed with a monologist who performs unscripted shows equipped with nothing more than scribbled bullet points and a glass of water. We wrote him a fan letter and found ourselves sharing lunch and eventually a friendship.
People don't get involved with local charities or politics because they think it's hard to make a difference and the problem feels overwhelming. But I believe that if all I've time for this year is to write one letter to the local council, it's still worth doing.
I still want to write Clint Eastwood a letter saying, 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry for all us wimp actors. You're the truth.' I guarantee he's not the person you want to fight, even now! You look at him, and you don't want to mess with him. He would still take you down.
When you sign your letter of intent to go to college you kind of sign away, and understand that you have certain rules and obligations that you have that normal students don't have... it's part of the process, being apart of the university and what you represent.
She kindly laments that I am not of the party, and to be sure I honour great ladies, and I admire great wits, but I am of the same opinion in regard to assemblies that is held concerning oysters, that they are never good in a month that has not the letter R in it.
Do not meet or overtake a patient who is moving about in order to speak to him or to give him any message or letter. You might just as well give him a box on the ear. I have seen a patient fall flat on the ground who was standing when his nurse came into the room.
One of the things that gave me most pleasure was a letter sent to me by Sebastian Vettel, written in his own hand, full of beautiful words and kindness. I wasn't expecting this; usually, drivers don't do this: they drive, and that's it. But he is a beautiful person.
I'm still getting used to the idea that people out in the world are reading my books. Every time I get a 'fan letter,' I am thrilled. But when people tell me that they're from the south or western Kentucky, and they say, 'I know exactly what you mean!' That's awesome.
My first audition was for Terrence Malick's 'The Tree of Life.' These casting directors came through Texas, and they recruited somewhere around 10,000 kids to come and audition for this movie. They sent me a letter in the mail, and I went and auditioned for this movie.
I was so anxious for it to be my turn, for the manager to read the letter from my mum. I waited and waited for it. The manager had spoken to the mothers of every player in the team; he'd been reading a message before every game for months, and finally my turn had come.
We haven't lost romance in the digital age, but we may be neglecting it. In doing so, antiquated art forms are taking on new importance. The power of a handwritten letter is greater than ever. It's personal and deliberate and means more than an e-mail or text ever will.
Historically the Puritans left England to escape religious persecution, and they promptly turned around and started persecuting the people they didn't agree with - the scarlet letter A, and the stocks and the dunking board came from that. That puritanism is still there.
It is questionless desirable in all ordinary cases, wherever positive law is established, to restrain ourselves within the letter of that law and to allow the criminal all the benefit, if benefit to him shall result, of any evasion or escape that the law shall afford him.
It would be easy to assume that the open letter is a symptom of the Internet age. Such is not the case. In 1774, Benjamin Franklin wrote an open letter to the prime minister of Great Britain, Lord North - a satirical call for the imposition of martial law in the colonies.
We cannot afford to have any large section of the business world in doubt whether they have broken the laws or not, and we cannot let the laws become a dead letter through vagueness. In this view it is clear that an administrative commission can render invaluable service.