Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Under the Timber and Stone Act of 1878, which might well have been called the 'Dust and Ashes Act,' any citizen of the United States could take up one hundred and sixty acres of timber land and, by paying two dollars and a half an acre for it, obtain title.
These people live again in print as intensely as when their images were captured on old dry plates of sixty years ago... I am walking in their alleys, standing in their rooms and sheds and workshops, looking in and out of their windows. Any they in turn seem to be aware of me.
Sixty felt like a big landmark. Not in a dreadful sense, but none of the other birthdays have bothered me. It's got labels on it - OAP, retirement - and I just wanted to take stock. I wanted to be in my greenhouse at home and at least give myself the opportunity of not working again.
In all seriousness, people think that it's the ideas that are important. Well, everyone has ideas, all the time. I tend to write mine down and remember them, but at some point you have to apply the bum to the seat and knock out about sixty five thousand words - that's how long a novel is.
I always look for a story that hasn't been told in the same way. I don't care about a lot of the usual elements people use for a quick drama boost. I want to know, for example, what happens when a man who was victimized by his father tries to be a father to a woman sixty years his senior.
In the early stages of negotiation software, on your smartphone, there may be programs that listen to the pitch of a voice, or that test for stress. You'll just ask the program, 'Was he lying? Was he eager to do business with me?' Maybe the computer will be right sixty per cent of the time.
Sixty percent of all Indians live in urban areas, but nobody's writing about them. They're really an underrepresented population, and the ironic thing is very, very few of those we call Native American writers actually grew up on reservations, and yet most of their work is about reservations.
One thing that I always loved about, say, 'Raiders of the Lost Ark', is that Indiana Jones gets the Ark of the Covenant about sixty percent of the way through the movie. And then the rest of it is get-out-alive. To me, that's really cool. Because he's the one you care about at the end of the day.
PepsiCo is the largest food-and-beverage company in the United States, and the second-largest in the world after Nestle. If PepsiCo were a country, the size of its economy - sixty billion dollars in revenues in 2010 - would put it sixty-sixth in gross national product, between Ecuador and Croatia.
Most men are far younger when they have their children and they're building their careers. If they are older they probably don't have the luxury of retiring - and generally sixty something-year-old men don't choose to have a child and spend all their time with that child. So it was a very unique situation.
The Tibetans are dirty. They wash once a year and, except for festivals, seldom change their clothes till they begin to drop off. They are healthy and hardy; even the women can carry weights of sixty pounds over the passes. They attain extreme old age; their voices are harsh and loud, and their laughter is noisy and hearty.
I was thinking about vampires and, specifically, about what makes vampires a romantic trope: about what people like about not just vampires but supernaturally long-lived creatures in general, which is a thing that shows up in probably fifty to sixty percent of paranormal romances... And then, for some reason, I decided to reverse it.
There was a study done in the early 20th century of all the entrepreneurs who entered the automobile industry around the same time as Henry Ford; there were something like 500 automotive companies that got funded, had the internal combustion engine, had the technology, and had the vision. Sixty percent of them folded within a couple of years.
The buckyball, with sixty carbon atoms, is the most symmetrical form the carbon atom can take. Carbon in its nature has a genius for assembling into buckyballs. The perfect nanotube, that is, the nanotube that the carbon atom naturally wants to make and makes most often, is exactly large enough that one buckyball can roll right down the center.
