Top 444 Sells Quotes & Sayings - Page 8

Memoirs are going to be problematic sells for a while, though, because even if memoir means "based in memory," right now, in the collective mind, memoir means "recovery." When my agent and I started looking at small presses the possibility for my book, I realized most small presses were not publishing memoir, because they don't want to be associated with the genre that Mary Karr calls, half-facetiously, "literature's trashy cousin."

The silliness-much of which is clearly intentional-is blended with some genuine grandeur. The Pixar touch is evident in the precision of the visual detail and in the wit and energy of Michael Giacchino's score, but the quality control that has been exercised over this project also has a curiously undermining effect. The movie eagerly sells itself as semitrashy, almost-campy fun, but it is so lavish and fussy that you can't help thinking that it wants to be taken seriously, and therefore you laugh at, rather than with, its mock sublimity.

I think that in the past, in the '50s and '60s, after the existentialists and beatniks and hippie movements, the big deal was, Don't sell out. We live in a society that by virtue of the speed we communicate and sell, everything sells. The danger is buying in; that your concern becomes success, rather than fulfillment. They're two different beasts, and my feeling is that you should seek fulfillment. You should not measure your worth in how much you have or how popular you are, but how happy you are with what you do.

No one can write a best seller by trying to. He must write with complete sincerity; the clichés that make you laugh, the hackneyed characters, the well-worn situations, the commonplace story that excites your derision, seem neither hackneyed, well worn nor commonplace to him. ... The conclusion is obvious: you cannot write anything that will convince unless you are yourself convinced. The best seller sells because he writes with his heart's blood.

What makes fantastic declarations believable is, in part, the vehemence with which they're proffered. Again, in the world of spirituality as well as of pop psychology, intensity of personal belief is evidence of truth. It is considered very bad form - even abuse - to challenge the veracity of any personal testimony that might be offered in a twelve-step group or on a talk show, unless the testimony itself is equivocal... Whatever sells, whatever many people believe strongly, must be true.

I buy mainly Beatles bootlegs and stuff like that. I'm hoping I can go there today. My dad buys my drawings and he re-sells them for quite a bit more and then he puts the money in my savings. I just draw all the time and he buys and I get a lot money [laughs]. It's great. My dad's my best manager I ever had. If I get richer, I'd like to be able to buy more of the real collectible Beatles things. I just need a little more money to be a higher class collector [laughs].

A man's magic demonstrates what sort of person he is, what is held most deeply inside of him. There is no truer gauge of a man's character than the way in which he employs his strength, his power. I was not a murderer. I was not like Victor Sells. I was Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden. I was a wizard. Wizards control their power. They don't let it control them. And wizards don't use magic to kill people. They use it to discover, to protect, to mend, to help. Not to destroy.

Purchasing power is a license to purchase power. The old proletariat sold its labour power in order to subsist; what little leisure time it had was passed pleasantly enough in conversations, arguments, drinking, making love, wandering, celebrating and rioting. The new proletarian sells his labour power in order to consume. When he’s not flogging himself to death to get promoted in the labour hierarchy, he’s being persuaded to buy himself objects to distinguish himself in the social hierarchy. The ideology of consumption becomes the consumption of ideology.

Donald Trump is a world-class con artist. He conned all these people that signed up for Trump University. Now he's trying to do the same thing to Republican voters. He's trying to convince them that somehow he's the guy that is going to stand up to illegal immigration, but he hires illegal immigrants, that he's fighting for American workers, but he's hiring foreign workers for his hotels, that he's going to bring back jobs from China and from Mexico, but, in fact, he's creating jobs in China and Mexico, because that's where all of his suits and ties that he sells are made.

What the working man sells is not directly his Labor, but his Laboring Power, the temporary disposal of which he makes over to the capitalist. This is so much the case that I do not know whether by the English Law, but certainly by some Continental Laws, the maximum time is fixed for which a man is allowed to sell his laboring power. If allowed to do so for any indefinite period whatever, slavery would be immediately restored. Such a sale, if it comprised his lifetime, for example, would make him at once the lifelong slave of his employer.

Boxing always was corrupt and always will be corrupt. The three world champion's belts really are absurd. One single association would make this business more reputable. Just as powerful as the promoters, is the media. The cable networks control the cash flow. You can?t ignore the influence the media and the promoters have on the sport. They have a financial objective - high ratings, selling pay-per-views and selling out arenas. Because of the system, the public may not be seeing the best the sport has to offer, but what sells.

I tell young actresses today who are looking to get into films, "First of all, you are marginalized by the color of your skin." I tell actresses, "If you're too tall, if you're too fat, you're not going to work. I don't care how talented you are." It's a business, and sex sells. Sex, action, special effects, and violence sell. Yes, you can have art films about the triumph of the human spirit and all of that, but you'll have it done with a big-budget icon with a $20 million salary.

The Christian who drinks cannot win his drinking companions to Christ. The girl who dances will never win her dancing boyfriend! You may think to gain favor and influence with the unsaved by joining with them in the lodge, or attending with them the movies, or by smoking or drinking or playing bridge with them, but you cannot! Worldliness means powerlessness! And that means that every Christian who sells out is guilty of the murder of the poor lost souls that go to Hell because he lost his influence.

In America there's a tendency to write the same book over and over because that's what sells. So in a way, my success in America has come at the expense of what I do. I haven't sold out, and I haven't taken the popular road to writing a best-selling book. I've really bucked the system. So it was necessary for me not to go and find the easy fans, the ones who want something digestible and fast with a happy ending that they can read over and over again no matter how many different books it is. I had to find fans who really wanted to think. Worldwide they all have that in common.

When a series is doing well, it's very tempting to keep writing it, even when the creative well is drying up. It's tempting because that's where the money is. I've had to be very careful; as soon as I think I'm getting close to that dry well, I wrap the series up. I don't want to just keep writing something because it sells.

When you know your work sells, then seeking a gallery or outdoor show is fine. Then, if an event or art gallery kicks sand in your face don't give up, keep moving forward. Use your brain and eliminate a lot of your personal agony. There are times when you should not take NO for an answer. But there are others when you should never put yourself in the place to be rejected to begin with. Seek the wisdom to know the difference and then go for it. Persevere in the face of disappointment.

I'm an optimist. I hope if a movie's good that it will be a success, but that's not always true, just because of popular taste or any other reasons. When something doesn't do better than it deserves to in your mind, it's pretty transparent - you usually know why. Is that a comfort? Yes, because it's logical. Does it make you happy? No, because if you think a movie is beautiful or interesting, you want to share it. Sometimes you make very interesting movies that aren't meant for everybody. But this is a capitalist society, so everything conspires to put value on whether it sells or not.

First one gets works of art, then criticism of them, then criticism of the criticism, and, finally, a book on The Literary Situation , a book which tells you all about writers, critics, publishing, paperbacked books, the tendencies of the (literary) time, what sells and how much, what writers wear and drink and want, what their wives wear and drink and want, and so on.

[The U.S. Treasury] can borrow basically unlimited amounts. They can stay there for years and years. These assets will be worth more money over time. So when Merrill Lynch sells a bunch of mortgage-related assets at 22 cents on the dollar like they did a month or so ago, the buyer goes - is going to make money, and he's going to make a lot more money if it happens to be an institution like the U.S. government which has very, very cheap borrowing costs.

It is not my behavior to either wear minimum clothes, to band or to even be comfortable with a sex-symbol label. I just want to do fine work instead of sporting such meaningless tags. Sex sells, but to a small extent, not always. And this is what filmmakers have to accept. The exposure has to be significant to the film and its characters and not forced for the sake of titillation. On the contrary, some of the greatest Indian films have been devoid of all these sexual trappings. I know my comfort zone in today's Indian culture and society.

And they say She's in the class A Team Stuck in her daydream Been that way since eighteen, but lately, Her face seems Slowly sinking, wasting Crumbling like pastries And they scream The worst things in life come free to us Cos we're just under the upperhand Go mad for a couple grams And she don't want to go outside tonight And in a pipe she flies to the Motherland Or sells love to another man It's too cold outside For angels to fly Angels to fly

For they (capitalists) hold as their chief heresy, in a coarser form, the fundamental falsehood that things are not made to be used but made to be sold. All the collapse of their commercial system in their own time has been due to that fallacy of forcing things on a market where there was no market; of continually increasing the power of supply without increasing the power of demand; of briefly, of always considering the man who sells the potato and never considering the man who eats it.

The public, as a whole, buys at the wrong time and sells at the wrong time. The average operator, when he sees two or three points profit, takes it; but, if a stock goes against him two or three points, he holds on waiting for the price to recover, with oftentimes, the result of seeing a loss of two or three points run into a loss of ten points.

We are missing the truth. We live in a society that lies and fosters and sells dishonesty at a discount. Remember the line, 'America spells cheese K-R-A-F-T? That does not spell cheese! We tell our kids that as long as it looks good on the outside, don't worry about the inside. Or work hard and you'll be rewarded in the end. That's not necessarily true anymore. We don't tell the truth about certain things. Young people see our hypocrisy. We haven't given them a model to follow.