Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

George Orwell

Don't give up. Don't ever give up.

Jim Valvano

In just six weeks from the time the design was started, we had the motor on the block testing its power.

Orville Wright

The subject matter of the stories on the surface... there seem to be a number of stories about travel.

Kenneth Koch

It is doubtless true that religion has been the world's psychiatrist throughout the centuries.

Karl Menninger, Man Against Hims

A good photograph is knowing where to stand.

Ansel Adams

It gets worse and worse. I love it, but I have no life. People grab me and kiss me. I like that, but it can be overwhelming.

Tarkan

We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: not so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference, so endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.

Adrienne Rich

There certainly is no secret in that there are plenty of people who don't like plenty of my movies. Each one of my films is personal each one of my films is emotionally autobiographical. And I like directors who do that. With each one of my films, I'm exploring one of my own issues and I try to expose myself a little in the film.

Jason Reitman

A man carries his success or his failure with him, it does not depend on outside conditions.

Ralph Waldo Trine

I couldn't wait for success, so I went ahead without it.

Jonathan Winters

Things die. But they don't always stay dead. Believe me, I know.

Richelle Mead