I'm quite interested in my own mental processes, simply because I'm a failed scientist, and because I'm interested in how the brain and the mind works, and I like to avoid easy descriptions.
A. S. Byatt
I have a big problem with people who glamorize dumbness and demonize education and intellect. And I'm giving a pretty good description of Sarah Palin right now.
Aaron Sorkin
And when you clear away the cobwebs of the description of every job in the world, at the bottom of that job is service. It's service. And I took that ethic and applied it to my writing craft.
Adriana Trigiani
We know their names: Hippolyta, Antiope, Thessalia. But they were long thought to be just travelers' tales or products of the Greek storytelling imagination. A lot of scholars still argue that. But archaeology has now proven without a doubt that there really were women fitting the description that the Greeks gave us of Amazons and warrior women.
Adrienne Mayor
I fell in love with Norman Mailer's 'Of a Fire on the Moon', a description of the 1969 moon landing and the society that had produced NASA - and was inspired by him to begin a kind of anthropology of modern life.
Alain de Botton
In some respects, big ideas can be a bit too big for a short story - especially if you've only got a couple of thousand words to play with, and you need room for other stuff, like character, description.
Alastair Reynolds
Similar to the telescope or the telephone, television enables us to see or hear things we never dreamed of. When you look at the details, a concrete scene between people is really something incredibly unlikely, something subtle that requires extended description.
Alexander Kluge
My unworldliness, even at 21, was abnormal. Not only had I never smoked tobacco nor touched alcohol of any description, but I had never yet set foot inside a theatre, or gone to a race course I had never seen, nor held a billiard cue, nor touched a card.
Algernon Blackwood
Nancy Drew was always changing her outfits. I despised girls' clothing, I couldn't wait to get home from school and get out of it. The last thing I wanted to read was minute descriptions of Nancy's frocks.
Alison Bechdel
'Lucky Us' ends with a description of a photograph of the novel's fictional family. I could never get enough of my own family photo albums.
Amy Bloom
When I'm not the Tiger Mom, I'm a professor at Yale Law School, and if one thing is clear to me from years of teaching, it's that there are many ways to produce fabulous kids. I have amazing students; some of them have strict parents, others have lenient parents, and many come from family situations that defy easy description.
Amy Chua
Columnists must make sure that when they describe an event, they are being accurate in their description. When they quote someone, they are required to do so accurately. Errors that are made must be corrected openly and quickly.
Andrew Rosenthal
I think screenplay is hard. I've tried that, and it felt really difficult; like, all the stuff I think I'm good at, like description and internal experience and memory, you can't do that - or, at least, I couldn't figure out a way.
Andrew Sean Greer
One of the things that frequently gets lost in descriptions of depression is that the depressed person often knows that it is a ludicrous condition to feel so disabled by the ordinary business of quotidian life.
Andrew Solomon
In fact, one of the descriptions of the character in the book is that 'IT' was not very good at replicating human emotions. And that's something that is overlooked in general.
Andy Muschietti
I spent a lot of time on my own working out the physical vocabulary for how Gollum moved. As I say, I drew on a lot of Tolkein's descriptions of how he moves, but also the conceptual artist sketches.
Andy Serkis
Voyeurism is a director's job description. It's an artist's, too.
Andy Warhol
I've always been charmed by houses, and descriptions of them are prominent in my novels. So prominent, in fact, that my editor once pointed out to me that all of my early novels had houses on the covers.
Anita Shreve
My very first products were hand-made, one-of-a-kind pins. When I finally realized I could repeat a phrase to make multiples, 'intellectuals gone bad,' a fairly succinct description of my own life, seemed appropriate.
Anne Taintor
I just love the days when you come out of the archives with half a dozen excellent descriptions or poignant accounts of personal experiences.
Antony Beevor
I couldn't imagine what it's like to be a journalist talking about music. You're left with empty descriptions; you probably have to make up a sort of weird cocktail of band influences and references to other music to get your point across.
My only description for me is that there's no throwaway people. That's the creed that I live by. It doesn't matter if I'm singing or not. That's the kind of person that my father and mother wanted me to be. The end obligation is to make people feel good about who they are.
In many ways, string theory attempts to go beyond Einstein's dream... an all-encompassing description of nature that works at large distances where gravity becomes important as well as small distances where quantum mechanics is important.
Restaurants stress the protein. People read menu items left to right, with the protein first. I read descriptions right to left.
We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.
Socialism, on the contrary, extends its function to the description of society as it should be, and the discovery of the means of making it what it should be.
'John Doe' is typically used in a warrant when the accused is known by an alias or by a physical description.
Engineering producers who don't play and have technology as a background may be the reason why there's a lot of cold non-musical music, for lack of a better description.
The Tea Party is simply a loose description of local activism driven by Americans who want smaller government and more self-reliance. That sounds like what the Founding Fathers had in mind, does it not?
My music has been called heavy metal, but that's not an accurate description. I'd rather call it articulate rock because it expresses many feelings and emotions.
If you go for an audition, you have a character description, and for the women, it's always about being beautiful, sexy. And for the men it's more about the character than how he appears physically. That annoys me.
The greater the burden a man takes upon his shoulders, the stronger he must be to carry it. No words are unmentionable, no action or horror beyond powers of description, if one is equal to them.
I think the word 'social entrepreneur' is a really good description of what I am. What that means me to is that you have the entrepreneurial gift and spirit to create something out of nothing.
Disney World is exactly the wrong description of how the Secret Service should operate in public. Their jobs are not about pleasing adults and children, but rather protecting the president and the first family.
I think it's clear to most people that the description of pro-life Democrat is accurate. I've been very consistent. What it means is I try to support policies that help women and children both before and after birth.
Less really is more. It's a tendency of beginning writers to want to prove what they're talking about by going too far with description. I think you've got to keep it short, crisp and clean.
It's just I hate reading the description 'offbeat' about a character in a script, because I, along with Seth Green, Jamie Kennedy and a few others, have cornered the market on 'offbeat.'
The main challenge that television presents is that I have a tendency to say things with a great deal of precision and accuracy. Often a description of that sort, which will work in a book because people can read it slowly - they can turn the pages back and so on - doesn't really work on TV because it interrupts the flow of the moving image.
You almost can't avoid having some version of the multiverse in your studies if you push deeply enough in the mathematical descriptions of the physical universe.
Whenever I fill out the job description I put 'songwriter', never 'singer' or 'artist.' Singers come and go.
I really like 'This Side of Paradise' by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I think it's a cool description of a character.
To me, feminism is such a simple description: it's equal rights, economic rights, political rights, and social rights.
Northern Sweden holds a special kind of magic. It's cold, lonely, and the people are tough and silent, or so the stereotype says. This is Asa Larsson's home turf and I find as much joy in reading her closely observed descriptions of the environment, as in following her intriguing plots.
Lots of people can write a good first page but to sustain it, that's my litmus test. If I flip to the middle of the book and there's a piece of dialogue that's just outstanding, or a description, then I'll flip back to the first page and start it.
I think I'm good at metaphors and descriptions. Plot doesn't come naturally to me, so I work really hard at it.
I get my share of 'cold' requests via LinkedIn from people who are launching non-profit or for-profit ventures and who request a meeting to get my input or help. I wish I could say yes to all of them, but given limited bandwidth, I say yes to the subset who've written a compelling description of their work and who are underrepresented.
There is a power in God's gospel beyond all description.
Think about the comfortable feeling you have as you open your front door. That's but a hint of what we'll feel some day on arriving at the place our Father has lovingly and personally prepared for us in heaven. We will finally - and permanently - be 'at home' in a way that defies description.
Many science fiction writers are literary autodidacts who focus on the genre primarily as a literature of ideas rather than as a pure art form or a tool for the introspective examination of the human condition. I'm not entirely at ease with that self-description.
I remember my father saying to me once, 'I finally know how to describe you, Charlotte. You're prickly.' And he was right - prickly is a very good description. If I had to be an animal, I'd probably be a porcupine.
