Top 100 Quotes About Anecdotes
#1. With its shrewd analysis and its knowledgeable reflections on the state of the arts, as well as a rich array of anecdotes and quotations about patronage, Patronizing the Arts will appeal to a broad audience.
Jonathan Culler
#2. She had no images of this love. She could offer no anecdotes. It was a belief rather than a memory.
Margaret Atwood
#3. When we have a narrative in mind, we often plug in anecdotes that confirm it.
Nicholas Kristof
#5. For years and years I carried these notebooks around with me - I had hundreds of pages of notes, these fragments that consisted of biographical anecdotes, diary passages, critical rants, agitations, scenes of my marriage.
Kate Zambreno
#6. I'm not an overnight success. My early publishing history, through my first five books, was unfortunate in many respects, typified by a couple of short anecdotes.
John Lescroart
#7. I'm certainly very influenced by what you would call 'contemporary headline horror,' stuff that is true crime or for one reason or another catches our attention in the media, those strange cases that we end up obsessing about. I'm always influenced by weird anecdotes and news.
Dan Chaon
#8. Good writing is about finding and exploiting anecdotes that resonate with the reader. In storytelling, it's OK if you only make one point, as long as it's a good one.
Ben Clymer
#9. I can't actually wrap my mind around it easily - I can't really visualize what 2 million books looks like ... So I try to keep it real for myself by focusing on individual anecdotes of how my books have helped kids learn to love reading.
Rick Riordan
#10. Coincidence is a recognized element in 'real life.' All of us have anecdotes about those times when, by the merest coincidence, we avoided some disaster or stumbled onto some wonderful experience.
Jane Lindskold
#11. Her anecdotes had a polished quality, like she had read a book on what could possibly make a beautiful girl sound sympathetic and memorized the answers.
Jennifer Weiner
#12. Poetry is a kind of ingenious nonsense (Spence, Anecdotes
Isaac Barrow
#14. More Americans, and I have my own anecdotes of people that have a friend that never would've had a gun, thought about, and now is thinking about it.
Chuck Todd
#15. I find her anecdotes more efficacious than sheep-counting, rain on a tin roof, or alanol tablets ... you will find me and Morpheus, off in a corner, necking.
Dorothy Parker
#16. If you let yourself tell those smaller anecdotes or stories, the overarching capital-S Story will eventually rise into view.
Mary Karr
#17. I get verbal diarrhea in the writers' room. I just tell everyone a million anecdotes and stories and craziness, and we all double up on the floor laughing.
Jill Kargman
#18. The 'EU in a Nutshell' is a miscellany of facts and anecdotes about the system which rules us. It's a book you can delve into in pursuit of a particular fact, or crack open for entertainment at virtually any page.
Daniel Hannan
#19. What is the point of bad dates if not to have amusing anecdotes for your friends?
Gabrielle Zevin
#20. During depression the world disappears. Language itself. One has nothing to say. Nothing. No small talk, no anecdotes. Nothing can be risked on the board of talk. Because the inner voice is so urgent in its own discourse: How shall I live? How shall I manage the future? Why should I go on?
Kate Millett
#21. I tell everyone I interact with what I'm working on and let them bring me anecdotes that illustrate my themes.
Chuck Palahniuk
#22. Baseball is more like a novel than a war. It is like an ongoing, hundred-year work of art, peopled with thousands of characters, full of improbable events, anecdotes, folklore and numbers.
Luke Salisbury
#23. Bill Pearson is definitely a man to talk to, especially in the afternoon when he's had a couple of drinks because he's got so many stories and anecdotes.
Duncan Jones
#24. Why should I ever get fed up talking about my father? He was a brilliant, colorful man who left us with thousands of memories. Most people remember his films, but I've got anecdotes and advice and episodes of real life tucked away inside my head.
Danny Huston
#25. We [psychonauts] are all going to go into the books as pioneers, because it's too early for us to be anything else. There's no map, no finished database, just anecdotes of the crazy, crazy stuff that goes on. That's why it's so important to try and share [our stories].
Terence McKenna
#26. I was kind of reflecting on my life and certain experiences, and you know, when I'm teaching and coaching my partners on 'Dancing With the Stars,' I sort of use those stories and anecdotes to help them sort of overcome certain fears.
Derek Hough
#27. I write and write and write, and then I edit it down to the parts that I think are amusing, or that help the storyline, or I'll write a notebook full of ideas of anecdotes or story points, and then I'll try and arrange them in a way that they would tell a semi-cohesive story.
Al Yankovic
#28. Bud's relationship with the female sex was governed by a gallimaufry of primal impulses, dim suppositions, deranged theories, overheard scraps of conversation, half-remembered pieces of bad advice, and fragments of no-doubt exaggerated anecdotes that amounted to rank superstition.
Neal Stephenson
#29. Dangerous events were transformed over the years into humorous anecdotes; painful moments were modified into sweet tales of innocence.
Nicholas Sparks
#30. Conversation is the blood of baseball. It flows through the game, an invigorating system of anecdotes. Ballplayers are tale tellers who have polished their malarkey and winnowed their wisdom for years.
Thomas Boswell
#31. The part of me that creates the stories exists only in solitude. The one who shows up to share anecdotes and answer questions is a poor substitute for the story-maker.
Stephen King
#32. MacKinnon's treatment of the central issue of pornography as she herself poses it - the harm that pornography does to women - is shockingly causal. Much of her evidence is anecdotal, and in a nation of 260 Million people, anecdotes are a weak form of evidence.
Richard Posner
#33. And I began to tell little anecdotes that had happened to me, and people would laugh. And I began to like that, you know. But I knew that, 'cause I'd do that in school, but I wouldn't do it out there in front of all them people.
Mel Tillis
#34. You can always tell the old river hand by the way in which he stretches himself out upon the cushions at the bottom of the boat, and encourages the rowers by telling them anecdotes about the marvellous feats he performed last season.
Jerome K. Jerome
#35. Anecdotes are sometimes the best vehicles of truth, and if striking and appropriate are often more impressive and powerful than argument.
Tryon Edwards
#36. all this immorality and opportunism, this was what characterised them, not altruism, as the stories they had spun would have you believe. But then, this is a world whose running fuel is anecdotes and stories, he reminds himself.
Neel Mukherjee
#37. All a Jew has to do is recite a few proverbs or anecdotes to consider himself an expert on 'Jewishness.'
S. Ansky
#38. It's much better to wreak havoc on a show and be a maniac than promote myself. Plugs and anecdotes aren't really in line with my beliefs. Besides, if someone sees me on a morning show and thinks, 'That's not funny; this guy is crazy,' then I don't want them to come to the show anyway.
T. J. Miller
#40. A great mix of tips, tricks, and anecdotes, All is Forgiven, Move On has excellent ideas for your weight loss journey and for improving your life along the way!
Judith S. Beck
#41. The notes one of my uncles (who had the same kind of curiosity in collecting family anecdotes) once put into my hands, furnished me with several particulars relating to our ancestors.
Benjamin Franklin
#42. A tax cut is really one of the anecdotes to coming out of an economic illness.
George W. Bush
#43. I'm not funny in person. I mean I'm really not. I'm one of those people who always screw up anecdotes.
Bill Bryson
#44. Naturally, I mine my girlfriends' lives for good anecdotes and stories - so many of their experiences find their way into my books.
Lauren Weisberger
#45. I think in Russia, there's a lot of storytelling and anecdotes.
Eugene Mirman
#46. In one of my favorite anecdotes about Foucault, someone asks him why he writes books. He responds by saying something like "When I begin to write a book, I do not know how it will come out, what it will say in the end. If I already did, I wouldn't need to write it."
Thomas L. Dumm
#47. About 100 things that your kid will do that will surprise you and break your heart and it will be a combination of fact based therapy, medically advised kinds of passages accompanied by celebrity anecdotes and just some funny stuff to lighten the load.
Alan Thicke
#48. Life is the episodic collection of anecdotes that has some deeper meaning.
Surbhi Sareen
#49. If you would stick to the concrete, and put your discoveries in the form of entertaining anecdotes about your adventures with women, your conversation would be easier to follow.
George Bernard Shaw
#50. Due to the potent combination of my sexual recklessness and the slutty nature of some of the girls I have slept with, I have accumulated enough stories and anecdotes about abortion that they could name a Planned Parenthood clinic after me.
Tucker Max
#51. I grew up in a society where everything you did was eavesdropped on, recorded, snitched on. I had friends when we were kids getting into trouble for telling anecdotes about Communist leaders.
Jan Koum
#52. Do you think the porter and the cook have no anecdotes, no experiences, no wonders for you? The walls of their minds are scrawled all over with thoughts. They shall one day bring a lantern and read the inscriptions.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#53. As we grow older, our bodies get shorter and our anecdotes longer.
Robert Quillen
#54. Praise be to God, Who has so disposed matters that pleasant literary anecdotes may serve as an instrument for the polishing of wits and the cleansing of rust from our hearts.
Ahmad Al-Tifashi
#55. One of our worst traits in journalism is that when we have a narrative in our minds, we often plug in anecdotes that confirm it. Thus we managed to portray President Gerald Ford, a first-rate athlete, as a klutz.
Nicholas Kristof
#56. I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty.
Julian Barnes
#57. The memories of our glories fade, and rot away into half-arsed anecdotes, thin and unconvincing as some other bastard's lies. The failures, the disappointments, the regrets, they stay raw as the moments they happened.
Joe Abercrombie
#59. A typical biography relying upon individuals' notorious memories and the anecdotes they've invented contains a high degree of fiction, yet is considered 'nonfiction.'
Joyce Carol Oates
#60. Oh yes," said Nanny Piggins. "I can regale people with anecdotes from my sordid past and think at the same time.
R.A. Spratt
#61. One of the most intriguing things in management and in business is the role of storytelling - people need the anecdotes to do the work that they do.
Anita Roddick
#62. To be angered by evil is to partake of it, stupid. - Phrases of Import and Salvation, Chapter IX, The Book of Universal Truths and Other Humorous Anecdotes
Alan Dean Foster
#63. Anecdotes and maxims are rich treasures to the man of the world, for he knows how to introduce the former at fit place in conversation.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#64. The Dance: A minimum of explanation, a minimum of anecdotes - and a maximum of sensations.
Maurice Bejart
#65. There is something about the creative process ... which is that you can't talk about it. You try to think of anecdotes about it, and you try to explain, but you're never really saying what happened ... it's a sort of happy accident.
Betty Comden
#66. Like most people my age, my job is the main focus of my life. I don't have some kind of jet-setting fabulous lifestyle where I'm constantly in situations to acquire amazing anecdotes, that's it.
Anna Paquin
#68. How idle a boast, after all, is the immortality of a name! Time is ever silently turning over his pages; we are too much engrossed by the story of the present to think of the character and anecdotes that gave interest to the past; and each age is a volume thrown aside and forgotten.
Washington Irving
#69. Anecdotes don't make good stories. Dig down so far that what finally comes out is not even what you thought it was about.
Alice Munro
#70. Only the history of free peoples is worth our attention; the history of men under a despotism is merely a collection of anecdotes.
Nicolas Chamfort
#71. She had a knack or weakness for laughing boisterously at her own anecdotes - not, I thought, because she found herself funny, but because she thought that life needed celebrating and wanted others to join in.
Ian McEwan
#72. I don't have a lot of thrilling anecdotes about my career or personal life. All the stuff that is interesting is private and I wouldn't want people to know.
Natalie Merchant
#73. Like many rich men, he thought in anecdotes; like many simple women, she thought in terms of biography.
Anita Brookner
#74. Anecdotes don't make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.
Alice Munro
#75. Plutarch's peers were writing "rhetorics," which were these dry philosophical treatises that made really broad gestures about life and death and fate. Plutarch stepped out of the stream to create an essayistic form that relied on a digressive structure and down to earth anecdotes.
John D'Agata
#76. All I've ever ended up with in terms of achievements is the movie, some really stupid anecdotes, a bunch of crosswords that I didn't finish and maybe some old bicycle that I found lying around on set.
Christian Bale
#77. I haven't got many anecdotes. Maybe I should do something scandalous.
Cate Blanchett
#78. After a person dies, his biographers feel free to give him a glittering list of intimate friends. Anecdotes are so much tastier spiced with expensive names.
Louise Brooks
#79. A life saved is a statistic; a person hurt is an anecdote. Statistics are invisible; anecdotes are salient.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#80. My critique of how we deal with drugs in society is just that - that we use these anecdotes to apply to everyone and the anecdotes are not representative.
Carl Hart
#81. The short stories tend to be a journalistic gathering of anecdotes that are put together to make something larger.
Chuck Palahniuk
#82. Anecdotes, personal stories, reminiscences, like biblical parables, are the medium through which faith is restored. Stories are a form of poetry, and give us a saving image to personally relate to.
Peter Block
#83. Life divides into amazing enjoyable times and appalling experiences that will make future amazing anecdotes.
Caitlin Moran
#84. He had learned how to assemble Jewish texts, Greek philosophy, and Middle-Western evangelistic anecdotes into a sermon. And he had learned that poverty was blessed, but that bankers make the best deacons.
Sinclair Lewis
#85. Well, politics is much more severe than entertainment. You have to hit those points, in politics, word for word. You have to remember the date. You have to remember the website. You have to rehearse stories that might be asked, have anecdotes ready for questions that might come up.
Matt Walsh
#86. Statements about climate trends must be based on, er, trends. Not individual events or occurrences. Weather is not climate, and anecdotes are not statistics.
Chris Mooney
#87. There is no history worthy attention save that of free nations; the history of nations under the sway of despotism is no more than a collection of anecdotes.
Nicolas Chamfort
#88. Cognitive psychology tells us that the unaided human mind is vulnerable to many fallacies and illusions because of its reliance on its memory for vivid anecdotes rather than systematic statistics.
Steven Pinker
#89. A remarkable memoir that's packed with anecdotes, advice and humor, all while maintaining a high level of dignity and self-awareness.
Steve Martin
#90. It's usually a jolly good trick to pick up a local tour guide. They can tell you all the anecdotes that make a place interesting. I'm one for rushing off to museums at the crack of dawn, eating fabulous things on terraces for lunch, and enjoying long dinners on balmy evenings.
Jane Birkin
#92. My favorite part of any baseball book - and I read a lot of them - is the anecdotes. I believe there is a story within every boxscore and for me - the more outrageous the better!
Jonathan Weeks
#93. I don't know how to tell a joke. I never tell jokes. I can tell stories that happened to me ... anecdotes. But never a joke.
Lucille Ball
#94. With 'Hollow Circus,' I used a family story that haunted me as a kid, one of those anecdotes about a family member that would rarely be spoken of in front of the children.
Peter Milligan
#95. Me, I think you only get at gist by assembling all the tiny inconclusive anecdotes that would fall flat at a dinner table and that seem irrelevant until you collect them in a pile.
Lionel Shriver
#96. The earliest impetuses for writing, for me, were simply the strange things I happened to notice in my everyday life, stuff I read about in the grocery store tabloids my mom bought, situations that struck me as compelling, anecdotes I'd heard, images, words, metaphors.
Dan Chaon
#98. Sometimes ... the short short appears to rest on nothing more than a fragile anecdote which the writer has managed to drape with a quantity of suggestion. A single incident, a mere anecdote - these form the spine of the short short.
Irving Howe
#100. History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.
Thomas Kuhn
