I know I have to be like people expect, because people love to dream with me, they like to think that I love my boat of 50 metres, that I drink Cristal for breakfast, that I dance until five o'clock in the morning. I am not like that.

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

I only hope, for the sake of the rising male sex generally, that you may be found in as vulnerable and soft-hearted a mood by the first eligible young fellow who appeals to your compassion.

Charles Dickens

Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short, in all the management of human affairs.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The film of evening light made the red earth lucent, so that its dimensions were deepened, so that a stone, a post, a building, had greater depth, and more solidity than in any daytime light; and these objects were curiously more individual- a post was more essentially a post, set off from the earth it stood in and the field of corn it stood out against. All plants were individuals, not the mass of crop; and the ragged willow tree was itself, standing free of all other willow trees. The earth contributed a light to the evening. The front of the gray, paintless house, facing the west, was luminous as the moon is. The gray dusty truck, in the yard before the door, stood out magically in this light, in the overdrawn perspective of a stereopticon.

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wr

Being an artist is a very long game. It is not a 10-year game. I hope I'll be around making art when I'm 80.

Anish Kapoor

Despite the Great Chain of Being's traditional ranking of humans between animals and angels, there is no evolutionary justification for the common assumption that evolution is somehow 'aimed' at humans, or that humans are 'evolution's last word'.

Richard Dawkins

My dad always said, 'Don't worry what people think, because you can't change it.'

Daisy Donovan

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

Vaclav Havel

Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain.

J. K. Rowling

Never give in! Never give in! Never, never, never. Never -- in anything great or small, large or petty -- never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.

Sir Winston Churchill

I've always shied away from conventional wisdom, though I know the power of it.

Peter Jennings

Sometimes when my mom finds a fun article and really wants me to read it, I will. But I prefer to just kind of focus on what I want to do and not really what other people are saying, because I don't want that to affect me too much.

Missy Franklin