For the fiction students I teach, one of the most common mistakes is to start in the wrong place. Often the actual story doesn't begin until about a third of the way into their narratives. They start off instead with excessive scene-setting, metaphysical speculation, introducing nonessential dramatis personae, throat-clearing, etc.

Darin Strauss

The next phase of the journey is to move from speculation to actual use cases - people getting into Bitcoin because they want to use it.

Adam Draper

Like the winds that we come we know not whence and blow whither soever they list, the forces of society are derived from an obscure and distant origin. They arise before the date of philosophy, from the instincts, not the speculations of men.

Adam Ferguson

Yeah, I think speculation keeps things really interesting.

Adam Lambert

The men are much alarmed by certain speculations about women; and well they may be, for when the horse and ass begin to think and argue, adieu to riding and driving.

Adelaide Anne Procter

The top 10 is really a media thing anyway unless you're the champion, but otherwise, it's always speculation.

Alistair Overeem

As this case has progressed, the evidence that the prosecution has claimed exists against me has been proven less and less and less. And all that has happened is that they've filled these holes with speculation.

Amanda Knox

Life must be something more than dilettante speculation.

Anna Julia Cooper

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

Barbara W. Tuchman

The Depression was an incredibly dramatic episode - an era of stock-market crashes, breadlines, bank runs and wild currency speculation, with the storm clouds of war gathering ominously in the background... For my money, few periods are so replete with human interest.

Ben Bernanke

The people I really do dislike are the morally unimaginative kind of evolutionary reductionists who, in the name of science, think they can explain everything in terms of our early hominid ancestors or our genes, with their combination of high-handed tone and disregard for history. Such reductive speculation encourages a really empty scientism.

Bernard Williams

I'm not much into speculation.

Bernie Sanders

Establishing a 0.03 percent Wall Street speculation fee, similar to what we had from 1914-1966, would dampen the dangerous level of speculation and gambling on Wall Street, encourage the financial sector to invest in the productive economy and reduce the deficit by more than $350 billion over 10 years.

Bernie Sanders

You want to know the way to raise money? Put a transaction fee on Wall Street, so maybe we can curb some of the speculation and raise some money.

Bernie Sanders

I'm rereading Jenny Offill's 'Dept. of Speculation.' I love it, and she's just a magician. Line by line and paragraph by paragraph, it's mesmerizing and so intricately plotted and so nimble.

Bill Clegg

I have never indulged our society's misguided notion that my personal life is relevant to my work, so any reporting surrounding that is necessarily hearsay, speculation or fantasy.

Billy Crudup

There's a certain degree of speculation that goes into valuations. In so far as the market supports a valuation, everyone who gets a great one deserves it, but they should also be cautious because that speculation is temporary. I saw Yahoo go from $100 billion to $10 billion. It's not a long-term measure.

Brian Acton

You don't need to raise taxes on rich people, because they create capitalization and investment. But you need to tax speculation - meaning capital gains.

Carlos Slim

Titan has no liquid water on its surface, and any liquid water beneath its surface is inaccessible to us, as far as we know. It has hydrocarbon lakes, but we don't know of any organisms that could live in those, not at the temperatures that we find on Titan. Any reference to possible life in lakes on the surface of Titan is pure speculation.

Carolyn Porco

The anticipation-speculation that comes with a weekly schedule is a double-edged sword. Because people have more time to talk about things, some crazy ideas get a lot of attention.

Cary Fukunaga

What's disgusting about genetic modification of food? I speculate that many people have an immediate, intuitive sense that what's healthy is what's 'natural,' and that efforts to tamper with nature will inevitably unleash serious risks - so-called Frankenfoods. The problem with that speculation is that it's flat-out wrong.

Cass Sunstein