I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding—joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid leaves with disgust.

Television is an excellent system when one has nothing to lose, as is the case with a nomadic and rootless country like the United States, but in Europe the affect of television is that of a bulldozer which reduces culture to the lowest possible denominator.

Marc Fumaroli

An important work of architecture will create polemics.

Richard Meier

If I have to produce movies, direct movies, whatever to change the way Hollywood treats older women, I'll do it. If I have to bend the rules, I will. If I have to break them, I will.

Naomi Watts

Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage.

William Shakespeare

You'd have to have one hell of an imagination to completely make up a story, but historians are very anal about what they think should be portrayed on screen. Thankfully they don't make movies we do.

Dougray Scott

Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work - the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside - the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don't show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within - that you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick - the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed. Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation - the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.http://www.thirteen.org/pressroom/release.php?get=1640

F. Scott Fitzgerald, essay: The

'Good Morning America' exploited Joan Lunden's pregnancy, but you won't see me bringing my babies on the air. The only reason I'm talking about the babies at all is that they've been with me on the show since I became pregnant. After a while, I had to acknowledge this pumpkin tummy.

Jane Pauley

We can offer up much in the large, but to make sacrifices in little things is what we are seldom equal to.

Johann von Goethe

Once you get used to thinking about Unit Tests as you write code, you tend to write code in nice tight modular pieces.

Stephan B Wessels

The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and mangled mind leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.

Elizabeth Drew, Poetry: A Modern

There is one plain rule of life. Try thyself unweariedly till thou findest the highest thing thou art capable of doing, faculties and outward circumstances being both duly considered, and then do it.

John Stuart Mill

What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?

Ian Mcewan