Quotes by Journalists - Page 72

To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you.
Ernest Hemingway
All good writers are thieves. The best get away with a heist.
Michael Stutz
You need the devotion to your work that a priest of God has for his.
Ernest Hemingway
If you lack confidence in setting one word after another and sense that you are stuck in a place from which you will never be set free, if you feel sure that you will never make it and were not cut out to do this, if your prose seems stillborn and you completely lack confidence, you must be a writer.
John McPhee
I have a great many opinions about writing, but I'm afraid that all of them are unprintable
Alfred Lansing
No one ever does the last thing on their list.
Ariel Gore
But, later, coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, "Well, now it's writing time and now I'll write.
Frank Herbert
I knew how severe I had been and how bad things had been. The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one who poverty bothers.
Ernest Hemingway
In order to write about life first you must live it.
Ernest Hemingway
Most people are resistant to ideas, especially new ones. But they are fascinated by character. Extravagance of personality is one way in which the pill can be sugared and the public induced to look at works dealing with ideas.
Paul Johnson
She was looking into my eyes with that way she had of looking that made you wonder whether she really saw out of her own eyes. They would look on and on after every one else's eyes in the world would have stopped looking. She looked as though there were nothing on earth she would not look at like that, and really she was afraid of so many things.
Ernest Hemingway
your moods and colors are my climate, not the changing face of the sky
John Geddes
Groves, with his eye for sizing up people who could get things done, saw the deep ambition Oppenheimer covered with his surface charm.
Garry Wills
I ceased to serve a king and began, instead, to serve a kingdom.
Geraldine Brooks
The introvert's dilemma is that we might not get a lot of invitations for the kind of socializing we like best--small, mellow gatherings. In other words, the kind of socializing other introverts like to do. Because, let's face it: We're introverts. We're all at home waiting to be invited to do introvert things. Which means, of course, that none of us are getting the invitations we crave. It's an introvert standoff.
Sophia Dembling
You're different, you know.""Only different from you," he said. "Not different from me.
Belinda Bauer
Extroverts sparkle, introverts glow. Extroverts are fireworks, introverts are a fire in the hearth.
Sophia Dembling
Captain West advanced to meet me, and before our outstretched hands touched, before his face broke from repose to greeting and the lips moved to speech, I got the first astonishing impact of his personality. Long, lean, in his face a touch of race I as yet could only sense, he was as cool as the day was cold, as poised as a king or emperor, as remote as the farthest fixed star, as neutral as a proposition of Euclid. And then, just ere our hands met, a twinkle of--oh--such distant and controlled geniality quickened the many tiny wrinkles in the corner of the eyes; the clear blue of the eyes was suffused by an almost colourful warmth; the face, too, seemed similarly to suffuse; the thin lips, harsh-set the instant before, were as gracious as Bernhardt's when she moulds sound into speech.
Jack London
Salander was an information junkie with a delinquent child's take on morals and ethics.
Stieg Larsson
Fashion is only different skins for different flavours of you.
Lauren Beukes
Jobs had always been an extremely opinionated eater, with a tendency to instantly judge any food as either fantastic or terrible. He could taste two avocados that most mortals would find indistinguishable, and declare that one was the best avocado ever grown and the other inedible.
Walter Isaacson
Years later, on a Steve Jobs discussion board on the website Gawker, the following tale appeared from someone who had worked at the Whole Foods store in Palo Alto a few blocks from Jobs' home: 'I was shagging carts one afternoon when I saw this silver Mercedes parked in a handicapped spot. Steve Jobs was inside screaming at his car phone. This was right before the first iMac was unveiled and I'm pretty sure I could make out, 'Not. Fucking. Blue. Enough!!!
Walter Isaacson
I'd rather be a little weird than all boring.
Rebecca McKinsey
From the very beginning Ihad felt a definite contact with Yeamon, a kind of tenuous understanding that talk is cheap in this league and that a man who knew what he was after had damn little time to find it, much less to sit back and explain himself.
Hunter S. Thompson
By adherence to a special set of rules, the child of the shabby-genteel can sometimes leap across the time which has passed by his family and function in the real world without doing violence to the hopes his mother held out for him. But those who cannot live within this pattern are the freaks and poets, and they travel a different road to peace.
Murray Kempton
Is it ever thus, at the end of things? Does any woman ever count the grains of her harvest and say: Good enough? Or does one always think of what more one might have laid in, had the labor been harder, the ambition more vast, the choices more sage?
Geraldine Brooks
There is something I want to do. But it's something to work towards, not something that should be handed to me on a plate. What's the point of doing something if you know you've got someone to rescue you if you fail? I like to work hard at something and then to reap the rewards. I take pride in what I do. What's the point if I know my rich husband will bail me out if I mess up?
Dorothy Koomson
Alice knows those stories. The routiers and condottieri of the Free Companies, who fight the wars of whichever prince will pay their fees, and amuse themselves in between times, are said to commit every kind of crime: from eating meat in Lent to slitting open pregnant women to kill their unborn and unbaptised children. The countryside of the southern lands is supposed to be full of their victims: a sea of vagabonds - priests without parishes; destitute peasants; artisans looking for work. ‘So you’, Alice says, ‘were one of the famous sons of iniquity…’ The Pope calls them that when they rob churches. But the Pope also uses them regularly. Alice knows she sounds a little breathless. She can’t altogether keep the admiration out of her voice. If she’d been a man, she thinks, she might have done exactly the same thing as Wat, to better herself fast.
Vanora Bennett
The older I get, the more I see how much motivations matter. The Zune was crappy because the people at Microsoft don't really love music or art the way we do. We won because we personally love music. We made the iPod for ourselves, and when you're doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you're not going to cheese out. If you don't love something, you're not going to cheese out. If you don't love something, you're not going to cheese out. If you don't love something, you're not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much.
Walter Isaacson
Universities, he (William Dershowitz) says, have been absorbed into the commercial ethos. Instead of being intervals of freedom, they are breeding grounds for advancement. Students are too busy jumping through the next hurdle in the résumé race to figure out what they really want. They are too frantic tasting everything on the smorgasbord to have life-altering encounters. They have a terror of closing off options. They have been inculcated with a lust for prestige and a fear of doing things that may put their status at risk.
David Brooks
Many of these new readers were not yet college-educated, but in terms of their seriousness about the world, their own literacy, and above all their ambitions for their children, they might as well have been.
David Halberstam
He hated House members who longed only to run for the Senate, and senators who longed only to run for the presidency. He was appalled by what he felt television had done to the Senate by the mid-fifties. It had become a major launching platform for presidential campaigns. He thought television had ruined the Senate as a serious body. “All they do there is preen and comb their hair and run for President. It’s like a presidential primary over there,
David Halberstam
Ambition is the capacity for unhappiness.
Manu Joseph
It is indeed strange, given the heavy emphasis placed by chroniclers on Churchill's sheer magnitude of personality, that the ingredient of pure ambition should be so much ignored or even disallowed.
Christopher Hitchens
I don't have the type of ambition that will make me do anything at any cost to get what I want. I don't want to be beholden to people. I don't want to open a shop with your money because I don't want to be indebted to you.""I'm your husband; it's our money.""Morally, legally, maybe yes, but in here," she put a hand to her head "and here," she lay the flat of her hand over her heart, "it's your money. You earned it or were given it way before you met me.
Dorothy Koomson
Oh, Pet. How you fascinate me.
Samantha A. Cole
I have also figured out that for many people death is a difficult subject, not at all as simple as it is for me.
Maija Haavisto
And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s centre.
George Orwell
--perhaps a soul is what you have spent your life making, not a piece of metaphysical equipment shipped ready-made from the factory, another myth like original sin, which you were outfitted with at birth and could somehow lose, like men high and low sometimes lost their humanity--
Bob Shacochis
What remains? Our children? Homer touched the flame of the candle with his fingers. The answer wasn’t easy to find for him,Achmed’s words still hurt him. He himself had been damned to be without children, unable for this kindof immortality, so he couldn’t do anything but choose another path to immortatlity. Again he reached for his pen. They can look like us. In their reflection we mirror ourselves in a mysterious way. United withthose we had loved. In their gestures, in their mimics we happily find ourselves or with sorrow. Friends confirm that our sons and daughters are just like us. Maybe that gives us a certainextension of ourselves when we are no more. We ourselves weren’t the first. We have been made from countless copies that have beenbefore us, just another chimera, always half from our fathers and mothers who are again the half oftheir parents. So is there nothing unique in us but are we just an endless mixture of small mosaic parts that never endingly exist in us? Have we been formed out of millions of small parts to a completepicture that has no own worth and has to fall into its parts again? Does it even matter to be happy if we found ourselves in our children, a certain line that hasbeen traveling through our bodies for millions of years? What remains of me?
Dmitry Glukhovsky
Hayt felt suddenly that he existed in a dream controlled by some other mind, and that he might momentarily forget this to become lost in the convolutions of that mind.
Frank Herbert
When I look at my life and at the secret color which it has, I feel as if tears were trembling in my heart. I am just as much the lips that I have kissed as the nights spent in the 'House before the World,' just as much the child brought up in poverty as this frenzied ambition and thirst for life which sometimes carry me away.
Albert Camus
...if the actor gave his performance without knowing that he was in a play, then his tears would be real tears and his life a real life. And whenever I think of this pain and joy that rise up in me, I am carried away by the knowledge that the game I am playing is the most serious and exciting there is.
Albert Camus
If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate.
George Orwell
As I usually do when I want to get rid of someone whose conversation bores me, I pretended to agree.
Albert Camus
Rubashov had always believed that he knew himself rather well. Being without moral prejudices, he had no illusions about the phenomenon called the "first person singular" and had taken for granted, without particular emotion, that this phenomenon was endowed with certain impulses which people are generally reluctant to admit. Now, when he stood with his forehead against the window or suddenly stopped on the third black tile, he made unexpected discoveries. He found that those processes wrongly known as monologues are really dialogues of a special kind - dialogues in which one partner remains silent while the other, against all grammatical rules, addresses him as "I" instead of "you," in order to creep into his confidence and to fathom his intentions, but the silent partner just remains silent, shuns observation, and even refuses to be localized in time and space.
Arthur Koestler
One recognizes one's course by discovering the paths that stray from it
Albert Camus
Doctrines are meant to serve man, not the other way around.
Amin Maalouf
When the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom that he destroys.
George Orwell
This is the story of a man named Eddie and it starts at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun. It may seem strange to start a story with and ending, but all endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time.
Mitch Albom
Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased.
Italo Calvino
Things have a life of their own," the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. "It's simply a matter of waking up their souls.
Gabriel García Márquez
It is better to burn than to disappear.
Albert Camus
The most important thing you do everyday you live is deciding not to kill yourself.
Albert Camus
There is always a danger that those who are less obviously and traditionally important, prominent, or powerful will be left out of the history of human experience.
Chloe Schama
And you dare to wear the golden spurs of a knight? You dare to call yourself a Marshal of France and carry the fleur-de-lis on your coat of arms? The meanest lackey in this hall knows more of honour and loyalty than you! Hang and burn my servants and kill me - kill too, now that you have handed your companion-in-arms Arnaud de Montsalvy, to your cousin. With my last breath, I shall call on Heaven to witness that Gilles de Rais is a traitor and a felon!
Juliette Benzoni
In Shahid's view, the best way through difficult times, as through life in general, was just to go along with things. It was a rare problem that couldn't be solved by being ignored.
John Lanchester
Almost don't matter. You got to deal with the situation at hand.
Gayle Forman
I used to fear their deaths--the car! the dog! the sea! the germ!--until I realized it need never be a problem: on the trolley, on the way to the mortuary, I would put my hands into their ribs and take their hearts and swallow them, and give birth to them again, so that they would never, ever end.
Caitlin Moran
...there is the sheer emotional, intellectual, physical, chemical pleasure of your children. The honest truth is that the world holds no greater gratification than lying in bed with your children, putting your leg on top of them in a semi-crushing manner, while saying sternly, "You are a poo.
Caitlin Moran