Robert Littell Quotes

#1. Mark Twain said, 'The right word is to the nearly right word as lightning is to the lightning bug.' Fill your book with lightning.

Robert Littell

#2. His ideas assumed a kind of stupefied and mechanical quality which is peculiar to despair.

Victor Hugo

#3. If a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing badly.

Robert Littell

#4. The greatest error of a man is to think that he is weak by nature, evil by nature. Every man is divine and strong in his real nature. What are weak and evil are his habits, his desires and thoughts, but not himself.

Ramana Maharshi

#5. I have a long-lasting gratitude and trust for what UNICEF does.

Audrey Hepburn

#6. I have a problem with Mitt Romney. And it's big problem - one that extends beyond our ideological differences. My big concern is that Mitt Romney wants to become president for no other reason than because there's a possibility he can win.

Jennifer Granholm

#7. Cole was meticulous to a fault; office scuttlebut had it that he never went out in public without first having his shoelaces ironed.

Robert Littell

#8. To the success of our hopeless cause

Robert Littell

#9. The poetry of Walt Whitman. I can return again and again to these magnificent poems and still get pleasure from reading them.

Robert Littell

#10. No fact is so simple that it is not harder to believe than to doubt at the first presentation. Equally, there is nothing so mighty or so marvelous that the wonder it evokes does not tend to diminish in time.

Lucretius

#11. It's a mistake to possess comfortable things," he said now. "Soft couches, big beds, large bath tubs, the like. Because if nothing is comfortable you don't settle in; you keep moving. And if you keep moving, you have a better chance of staying ahead of the people who are trying to catch up with you.

Robert Littell

#12. "Uisce Beatha" is a compounded distilled spirit being drawn on aromatics, and the Irish sort is particularly distinguished for its pleasant and mild flavour.

Samuel Johnson

#13. Fill your pages with details. Work hard to get the right word.

Robert Littell

#14. I dreamed of a green place once," he whispered. "A manor house and a little girl with red hair, and preparations for a wedding. If there are other worlds, then maybe there is one where I was a good brother and a good son.

Cassandra Clare

#15. I am not conventionally religious, but I am an ongoing student of the Old and the New Testament and the history of the Jewish people and the birth of Christianity.

Robert Littell

#16. I am an amateur mountain climber. Once or twice a year I go off to Chamonix in the French Alps, under Mont Blanc, and with a guide do treks that include rock climbing at high altitude.

Robert Littell

#17. Life is short," I told her. "The challenge is to make it sweet.

Robert Littell

#18. At the same time, I was listening to black music, and I began to think that the best musicians were receiving the worst treatment. The people who were doing the greatest work were despised as lower class, with no dignity accorded to what they did.

Henry Flynt

#19. We need to take our cue from the drug dealers in Hoboken who, when they reach twenty, go to the local undertaker and prepay their funeral because they don't expect to live to thirty.

Robert Littell

#20. When people ask me if I have worked for the C.I.A., I often answer: what good to you is my answer? Because if I did, I might not say so.

Robert Littell

#21. Should you start with a hypothesis and analyze data in a way that supported it, or start with the data and sift through it for a useful hypothesis?

Robert Littell

#22. I am a bookworm. For play, I bury myself in the corners of libraries and read.

Robert Littell

#23. He was gradually discovering the delight there is in frank kindness and companionship between a man and a woman who have no passion to hide or confess.

George Eliot

#24. Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Herbert Beerbohm Tree

#25. For me, Fitzgerald was one of the great American writers of the last century; a wordsmith, a storyteller, a perfectionist.

Robert Littell

#26. If you are stupid enough to dine with the devil, for Christ's sake use a long spoon.

Robert Littell

#27. The difference between and amateur and a professional.. a professional believes if a job is worth doing, it is worth doing well. An amateur believes if a job is worth doing, it very well may be worth doing badly.

Robert Littell