I never laugh or smile when I am writing. When I come home for lunch after writing all morning, my wife says I look like I just came home from a funeral. This is not bragging. This is an illness.

A turkey is more occult and awful than all the angels and archangels. In so far as God has partly revealed to us an angelic world, he has partly told us what an angel means. But God has never told us what a turkey means. And if you go and stare at a live turkey for an hour or two, you will find by the end of it that the enigma has rather increased than diminished.

G. K. Chesterton

If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I-Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.

Robertson Davies

Another challenge? Getting up at 6:30 in the morning to go act. It's not fun acting that early in the morning or acting at 4 A.M in the middle of the night or in the morning when you're really tired. That's a challenge. What a luxurious problem to have.

George Eads

I've figured out my learning curve. I can look at something and somehow know exactly how long it will take for me to learn it.

John Mayer

Film as dream, film as music. No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul. A little twitch in our optic nerve, a shock effect: twenty-four illuminated frames a second, darkness in between, the optic nerve incapable of registering darkness.

Ingmar Bergman, Laterna Magica

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

H. L. Mencken

Action is at bottom a swinging and flailing of the arms to regain one's balance and keep afloat.

Eric Hoffer

An ordinary man away from home giving advice.

Oscar Wilde

I work very hard on my health, and I think about it, of course, like I've never thought before.

Ann Richards

The duty of responsibility placed on any MP is one of the greatest honours that can be bestowed and I for one don't believe the Conservative Party would abuse that trust by selecting someone who did not have the goods to do the job, just for the sake of media coverage.

Adam Rickitt

If you're texting Magnus to say 'I think u r kewl' I'm going to kill you

Cassandra Clare

Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse.

Rebecca West