Whittle Down Quotes

#1. Not that I was morbidly obese or anything. But I guess I was hanging on the hope that one day I might accidentally whittle down to my inner toothpick.

Adele Griffin

#2. Once, I started listing off all the people that I truly cared about. When I got to number seven, Penelope told me I either needed to whittle down my list or stop making friends immediately. My mother says you should never have more people in your life than you could defend from a hungry rakshasa.

Rainbow Rowell

#3. The novelist's
any writer's
object is to whittle down his meaning to the exactest and finest possible point. What, of course, isfatal is when he does not know what he does mean: he has no point to sharpen.

Elizabeth Bowen

#4. Some actors count their lines as soon as they receive a script. I'm the opposite. I try to see how many lines I can whittle down. You can say just as much in 4 as you can in 14.

Glenn Ford

#5. Though it is the hardest thing, to work out one's weight and heft in the world, to whittle down all that I am and give it a value.

Anna Funder

#6. I might write four lines or I might write twenty. I subtract and I add until I really hit something I want to do. You don't always whittle down, sometimes you whittle up.

Grace Paley

#7. Yes, I have been forced to whittle down the facts, and to be a liar, but it is not one universe, there are millions, almost as many as the number of human eyes and brains in existence, that awake every morning.

Marcel Proust

#8. No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious.

H.L. Mencken

#9. You have to figure out as a band how a band becomes a business, and then you have to keep that business mentality separate from the creative one, which is good for the songs. It's always a work in progress.

David Longstreth

#10. When you succumb to cynicism, darkness, pessimism and sarcasm you are amplifying imbalance and negativity.

Bryant McGill

#11. When it comes down to the music, it's just you and the microphone. It's not you and the record execs.

Rita Ora

#12. Because the truth is, the world will probably whittle your daughter down. But a mother never should.

Meg Wolitzer

#13. You do not achieve anything without trouble, ever.

Margaret Thatcher

#14. Jupiter is so big and its gravitational pull so strong that man would find it difficult to move about on the surface. The answer is to whittle it down to proper size with terrajets and nuclear power, using the debris to increase the size of Jupiter's moons so they, too, can be colonized.

Fritz Zwicky

#15. nothing tastes as sweet as what I can't have

Teddy Geiger

#16. I have like 250 letters that I have to whittle it down to 150. Only then do you have the whole overview of a book. When it was finally edited, at least my take was, everybody's lying. You know?

Don Novello

#17. I think part of the problem sometimes is that there's so much happening in my books, to whittle it down into a single script is hard.

Sarah Dessen

#18. I do feel songwriting is a bit of its own creature and the writerliness of it ... it's freeing. It's good for people who have an innate resistance to any restrictions whatsoever.

Mirah

#19. I had always realized it was desirable to gear down the jet.

Frank Whittle

#20. If we make it national policy that we will support small farmers the way we support agribusiness, we'll suddenly see it change in terms of the cost of organic food.

Ruth Reichl

#21. We've gone from looking up at the moon to looking down at Instagram.

Bill Whittle

#22. I am one of those who hold that poetry is never so blithe as in a wanton and irregular subject.

Michel De Montaigne

#23. The key to SUCCESS is to START before you're ready

Marie Forleo