Nicely Written Quotes

#1. I wish my prose to be transparent-I don't want the reader to stumble over me; I want him to look through what I'm saying to what I'm describing. I don't want him ever to say, Oh, goodness, how nicely written this is. That would be a failure.

V.S. Naipaul

#2. A book is either nicely written or it's badly written. That's it.

Oscar Wilde

#3. When you don't know yourself, who you are and what you want, you just become a product of your environment - a leaf that gets blown each and every way until it just lands, in a big pile of mud, and gets stuck.

Evan Sutter

#4. That's my credo - My work is play. I don't complain about work. I enjoy it. I like the feeling of being able to lay down at night and you're so doggone tired, you're just hoping to get undressed before you fall asleep.

Buck Brannaman

#5. I can record auditions from my office in my home.

Jason Marsden

#6. Socialism" for the Nazis denotes the principle of collectivism as such and its corollary, statism - in every field of human action, including but not limited to economics. "To be a socialist," says Goebbels, "is to submit the I to the thou; socialism is sacrificing the individual to the whole."9

Leonard Peikoff

#7. People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we've lived; they're the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments.

Ted Chiang

#8. The voters in Wisconsin elected me last year for the third time because they wanted someone who aimed high, not aimed low. Before I came in, the unemployment rate was over eight percent. It's now down to 4.6 percent.

Scott Walker

#9. [B]inary opposites fit nicely the formulation of history as written, but they do little to capture the messy, inchoate reality of history as lived.

Ira Berlin

#10. It would astonish if not amuse the older citizens to learn that I (a strange, friendless, uneducated, penniless boy, working at ten dollars per month) have been put down as the candidate of pride, wealth, and aristocratic family distinction.

Abraham Lincoln

#11. It seems to me that the only thing for a pacifist to do is to find a substitute for war: mountains and seafaring are the only ones I know. But it must be something sufficiently serious not to be a game and sufficiently dangerous to exercise those virtues which otherwise get no chance.

Freya Stark

#12. One thing I have noticed is that when you're a younger editor, you're more intense about it. As you go along, you relax a little. More and more, I feel that the book is the author's. You give the author your thoughts, and it's up to him or her to decide what to do.

Jonathan Galassi

#13. And you are made of a hundred trillion cells. We are, each of us, a multitude.

Carl Sagan

#14. I like a good challenge. And I like to feel that I'm always learning something new.

Hannah Fidell

#15. Words are what give us power, that without words we are nothing, we do not exist.

Dee Brown

#16. He's a writer," she said, as though this explained everything. "He's disappeared before?" "He's emotional," she said, her expression glum. "He's always going off on one, but it's been ten days and I know he's really upset but I need him home now.

Robert Galbraith

#17. Wisdom most of the time takes form of advice.

Veda Catherine Storey

#18. To all that's afraid and who keep onworrying that the world is going to end today ... Enjoy your day and your life. We're all going to be here for a while longer!

Timothy Pina