Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story. Good description is a learned skill,one of the prime reasons you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It's not just a question of how-to, you see; it's a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing.

Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles; it is an act quite easy to be contemplated.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I set out to show that there exists single creative activity,which is displayed alike in the arts and in the sciences.It is wrong to think of science as a mechanical record of facts, and it is wrong to think of the arts as remote and private fancies. What makes each human, what makes them universal, is the stamp of the creative mind.

Jacob Bronowski, Science and Hum

Good politics starts with empathy, proceeds to analysis, then sets out values and establishes the vision, before getting to the nitty-gritty of policy solutions.

David Miliband

Wit makes its own welcome and levels all distinctions.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one's own genes in the generations to follow.

Lewis Thomas

Keeping up with the Joneses was a full-time job with my mother and father. It was not until many years later when I lived alone that I realized how much cheaper it was to drag the Joneses down to my level.

Quentin Crisp

I never hurt nobody but myself and that's nobody's business but my own.

Billie Holiday

What happened with Hurricane Katrina was the American electorate was forced to look at what lay behind the veneer of chest-beating. We all saw the consequences of having terrible government leadership.

Susan Faludi

Take care in your minutes, and the hours will take care of themselves.

Lord Chesterfield

There is a little Juliet inside me, hoping I will lock eyes with my Romeo on the other side of a fish tank or through a gap in a library bookcase. Hell, even if it's behind the condiments section in a supermarket. I don't really mind.

Jessica Thompson

There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.

Anais Nin

It is Basic Management 101 that if you reward failure you are going to get more failure, and if you want success you should reward success. But if you look at the way this administration has approached national security, they have kind of got that principle backwards.

Chris Van Hollen