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.

Brian Greene

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