Jean > Jean's Quotes

“(From first-time movie-producer, age 98): You're never too old to start something new and succeed with it.”
― Laurence Jaffe

“An editor is a person who knows more about writing than writers do but who has escaped the terrible desire to write.”
― E.B. White

“Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.”
― Pixar's 22 Rules of Storytelling

“If a lie be believed only for an hour, it hath done its work.”
― Jonathan Swift

“I'm not crazy about reality, but it's still the only place to get a decent meal.”
― Groucho Marx

“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“If there's a better book than this, I haven't written it.”
― Stephen Colbert

“When you constrain freedom, freedom will take flight and land on a windowsill.”
― Ai Weiwei

“Be like the bird that, passing on her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing that she hath wings.”
― Victor Hugo

“Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.”
― Annie Dillard

“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses.”
― Stephen King

“Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction.”
― Francis Picabia

“There is so much mercy around us and in us, so much available to us if we just have the eyes and intention to see it.”
― Anne Lamott

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
― William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

“We're so self-important. So arrogant. Everybody's going to save something now. Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save the snails. And the supreme arrogance? Save the planet! Are these people kidding? Save the planet? We don't even know how to take care of ourselves; we haven't learned how to care for one another. We're gonna save the fuckin' planet? . . . And, by the way, there's nothing wrong with the planet in the first place. The planet is fine. The people are fucked! Compared with the people, the planet is doin' great. It's been here over four billion years . . . The planet isn't goin' anywhere, folks. We are! We're goin' away. Pack your shit, we're goin' away. And we won't leave much of a trace. Thank God for that. Nothing left. Maybe a little Styrofoam. The planet will be here, and we'll be gone. Another failed mutation; another closed-end biological mistake.”
― George Carlin

“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”
― Leonard Cohen

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
― Isaac Asimov

“True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“All familiar things can open into strange worlds.”
― Jasper Johns

“Drink does not drown Care, but waters it, and makes it grow faster.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“Familiarity does not breed contempt, anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful. And that is all as it should be.”
― Gertrude Stein, Paris France

“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.”
― G.K. Chesterton