I get heartfelt thanks from all kinds of people. Today I heard from a waitress in Georgia who has lost her job and is trying to figure out how her local bank can change the terms on her credit card, and I heard from a physicist at a major research university who wants to explain a better theory of financial stress tests.

I've never been seriously involved with anyone. I've certainly never been in love. I've always preferred to keep things casual.

Rupert Grint

There are plenty of bad editors who try to impose their own vision on a book. ()A good novel editor is invisible.

Terri Windling

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

A race is a work of art that people can look at and be affected in as many ways they're capable of understanding.

Steve Prefontaine

I am a filmmaker. That is all I've ever been. You know, Martin Scorsese makes films about the mob. And I make movies about food.

Alton Brown

I hope to stay unemployed as a war photographer till the end of my life.

Robert Capa

And looking at today's music scene, I think it's cool that there are a lot of consumers and fans not limited by what radio and the record companies tell them to buy.

Juice Newton

I bought a house for my mom, I bought a house for my dad, I bought a house for my sister.

Trey Parker

A lawyers dream of heaven; every man reclaimed his property at the resurrection, and each tried to recover it from all his forefathers.

Samuel Butler

As she came up to the arch Elizabeth saw with a start that it was written on. She went closer. She peered at the stone. There were names on it. Every grain of the surface had been carved with British names; their chiselled capitals rose from the level of her ankles to the height of the great arch itself; on every surface of every column as far as her eyes eyes could see there were names teeming, reeling, over surfaces of yards, of hundreds of yards, over furlongs of stone.She moved through the space beneath the arch where the man was sweeping. She found the other pillas identically marked, their faces obliterated on all sides by the names that were carved on them.'Who are these, these ...?; She gestured with her hand.''These?' The man with the brush sounded surprised. 'The lost.''Men who died in battle?''No. The lost, the ones they did not find. The others are in cemetries.''These are just the ... unfound?'She looked at the vault above her head and then around in panic at the endless writing, as though the surface of the sky had been papered in footnotes.When she could speak again, she said, 'from the whole war?'The man shook his head. 'Just these fields.' He gestured with his arm.Elizabeth went and sat on the steps on the other side of the monument. Beneath her was a formal garden with some rows of white headstones, each with a tended plant or flower at its base, each cleaned and beautiful in the weak winter sunlight.'Nobody told me.' She ran her fingers with their red-painted nails back through her thick dark hair. 'My God, nobody told me.

Sebastian Faulks, 'Birdsong' p.

Whereas life separates meaning from emotion, art unites them. Story is an instrument by which you create such epiphanies at will, the phenomenon known as aesthetic emotion...Life on its own, without art to shape it, leaves you in confusion and chaos, but aesthetic emotion harmonizes what you know with what you feel to give you a heightened awareness and a sureness of your place in reality.

Robert McKee

A society's competitive advantage will come not from how well its schools teach the multiplication and periodic tables, but from how well they stimulate imagination and creativity.

Albert Einstein