Top 1200 Telling It Like It Is Quotes & Sayings - Page 14

Writing a first draft is like groping one's way into a dark room, or overhearing a faint conversation, or telling a joke whose punchline you've forgotten. As someone said, one writes mainly to rewrite, for rewriting and revising are how one's mind comes to inhabit the material fully.

Lewis Carroll, you see, wasn't really interested in telling an exciting story. Well, he wasn't interested in things like cause and effect or a linear narrative. It's surreal, it's absurd, it's wordplay, it's satirical, it's analyzing itself, it's funny, it's an enormous challenge.

I love doing all of my own stunts. Anything. Even if they are telling me, 'No, no, no! You can't do that!' I'll do it. Like crashing my car through the gate, climbing up the building, kicking in a window... I love doing all of that stuff.

I just don't like the separatism that comes from religion, and, without fail, the need to put your beliefs on someone else. When you start telling someone else how to live, you should check yourself, man.

I consider myself a lyricist first and foremost, but if you get something else out of what I do, that's fine too. I'm not sitting back here telling people how they have to take my stuff. We just want to play music, and hope that people like it.

I like that 'once upon a time' quality, where the telling of a tale has an elevated sense of story. There's a whimsical quality to it. Sometimes in fairy tales more things seem possible, even though often they're real world based.

You cannot know God until you've stopped telling yourself that you already know God. You cannot hear God until you stop thinking that you've already heard God. I cannot tell you My Truth until you stop telling Me yours.

I'd much rather talk about guitar playing. I hate it when people ask me about my lyrics. I always feel like telling them to just go and read them.

Once I started to retire, I was telling all of the girls in my generation, 'Wow I feel like an outsider in this locker room because this whole new generation of women has stepped in,' and that was one of the signs where I said maybe it's time to retire.

When I was in my early twenties, my mom started repeating things, asking the same questions, telling the same stories. It was like, Oh, God, this is not right. When I was 25, my brother and I finally told our dad we had to take her to the doctor.

I served on active duty in the U.S. Air Force and currently serve in the U.S. House of Representatives. Yet I still experience people telling me to 'go back' to China or North Korea or Japan. Like many immigrants, I have learned to brush off this racist insult.

The things we call cultures are dynamic, internally diverse, and their interpretation is internally contested among its members. Cultures are like ongoing conversations with many voices, often telling stories about who "we" are.

What I've been telling people is that the doctors are gaining on cancer very rapidly. It's almost become a chronic disease, like diabetes - something you can treat. It doesn't go away, and you're not well in the sense of being over it, but you go on and live your life.

Music for a long time has been telling what the world is like. What music has to say now, in a manner that has both logic and emotion in it, is that the world has a structure persons could like; be stronger by.... [If] the world is the oneness of opposites - and music says it is - the world is given an everlastingly sensible basis; for what could be more sensible that to be calm and forceful at once, reposeful and intense at once?

Don't patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he's stabbing the independent bookstores in the back.

I probably enjoy campaigning more than most other people in public office because I like people and I enjoy going out there and telling people what I've done.

Australian Aboriginees say that the big stories - the stories worth telling and retelling, the ones in which you may find the meaning of your life - are forever stalking the right teller, sniffing and tracking like predators hunting prey in the bush.

A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed. Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It's like telling the world there's no Santa Claus.

I feel like Christianity gets very misconstrued sometimes. People don't realize that every day is a normal day just like anybody else, but we're just trying to improve every day. It's not about putting anybody down or telling anybody they're wrong. It's more about trying to do what's right for your own self.

Like great art, something essential dies when great jokes are explained. So what's the key to telling a good joke/creating great art timing.

As a father, you find yourself telling this to your kids a lot. My son, when he didn't want to play baseball, I was like, "Buddy, try it. Try playing baseball and if you don't like it, that's fine. But I want you to try it. I want you to try as hard as you can at it. And then we'll talk about it." You kind of have to give yourself the same pep talk. As a 43-year-old, you're like, "You know what? Just, try it. Try as hard as you can, give it everything you got and then accept the results."

I just knew I loved music, and I wanted to do something in music, but I couldn't sing, I can't dance, I am an introvert. So I was like, 'What exactly is there for me to do? What can I do?' There's all these questions, there's all these things that are telling you 'no' instead of 'yes.' Those are the things I dealt a lot with, my insecurity.

I can remember playing for Carlisle and just running around like a headless chicken telling the others boys not to worry, that I'd do their running for them. I was just so eager and so keen and desperate to be a footballer that I did that.

We need more filmmakers of color telling the story. I'd like to see more filmmakers take their products out independently, put together a good commercial film and distribute it online.

I keep telling myself that I'm a human being, an imperfect human being who's not made to look like a doll, and that who I am as a person is more important than whether at that moment I have a nice figure.

When I've gone through those periods of depression or anxiety, it's almost like your body is telling you constantly with these panics that the world really is the terrible place that you think it is, and all the things you fear are true about yourself have to be true.

Welfare has destroyed the African-American family by telling young black women that husbands and fathers are unnecessary and obsolete. … We have incentivized fornication rather than marriage, and it's no wonder we are now awash in the disastrous social consequences of people who rut like rabbits.

When you're telling stories, you are actually trying to illuminate some portion of the truth in an artful way. The story may immediately seem to be a lie, but it's like an impressionistic painting - you see the light and the color better than you would with a photo-realistic piece.

I wrote that song for my wife, and it's what some guy who's sitting under a tree would be singing to the woman of his life, telling her how wonderful she is. To me, that's more lasting than something that sounds like it belongs on a movie soundtrack.

A man is not merely a man but a man among men, in a world of men. Being good at being a man has more to do with a man’s ability to succeed with men and within groups of men than it does with a man’s relationship to any woman or any group of women. When someone tells a man to be a man, they are telling him to be more like other men, more like the majority of men, and ideally more like the men who other men hold in high regard.

A wrong understanding is interested in precisionism. That is it tries to say that the Bible can't be telling the truth if it says that Jesus was such and such a distance from some place or other and in fact the distance is off by 15% or something like that. There are all kinds of grounded figures and so forth.

This actress named Lisa Eilbacher. I was up for the part in Shampoo and friends of mine kept telling me she was going around saying all these bad things about me. It's like we're still in the sixth grade sometimes.

I really fell into drama school - I had a lot of lot of luck. I didn't take criticism very well while I was there; in fact, I took it personally. With every note I got, I felt like they were telling me I was a bad person.

I think the novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. The novel receives streams of science, philosophy, poetry and contains all of these; it's not simply telling a story.

Crime fiction makes money. It may be harder for writers to get published, but crime is doing better than most of what we like to call CanLit. It's elementary, plot-driven, character-rich story-telling at its best.

The biggest mistake people make about me is that they see me as some sort of god-like figure with a big ego. If I see a button, a T-shirt, that says, 'Yngwie is God,' I just look at it as a complimentary way of people telling me they like me. Although it's very flattering, it doesn't change the way I look at myself.

I was telling somebody just the other day, there's technically such a hierarchy in this business. You have film, that's the ideal; then you have TV, and things like web series do not claim as much cred, but the fact is, if the material is solid and I believe and trust in the team that's involved, I don't care what format it is.

I get a lot of criticism for telling founders to focus first on making something great, instead of worrying about how to make money. And yet that is exactly what Google did. And Apple, for that matter. You'd think examples like that would be enough to convince people.

It is not unprofessional to give free legal advice, but advertising that the first visit will be free is a bit like a fox telling chickens he will not bite them until they cross the threshold of the hen house.

I saw 'Seinfeld' on TV and told my mum that would be something cool to try one day, and she was like, OK, 'Here is a five-year-old telling me what they want to when they grow up' sort of thing, and what would they know, right!

When you're in the editing room, the dangerous thing is that it becomes like telling a joke again and again and again. Eventually, the joke starts to not be funny. So you have to be careful that you're not throwing the baby out with the bath water.

To talk about communication theory without communicating its real mathematical content would be like endlessly telling a man about a wonderful composer, yet never letting him hear an example of the composer's music.

Tessa had begun to tremble. This is what she had always wanted someone to say. What she had always, in the darkest corner of her heart, wanted Will to say. Will, the boy who loved the same books she did, the same poetry she did, who made her laugh even when she was furious. And here he was standing in front of her, telling her he loved the words of her heart, the shape of her soul. Telling her something she had never imagined anyone would ever tell her. Telling her something she would never be told again, not in this way. And not by him. And it did not matter. "It's too late", she said.

Insecurity is a natural part of human nature, and there are times we feel our stories are not worth telling, so we turn to the people we admire for strength. If we dress like someone everyone thinks is cool, perhaps we'll be seen as cool.

Imitation is very easy, and the whole culture and society depends on imitation. Everybody is telling you how to behave, and whatsoever they are teaching you is nothing but imitation. Religious people - the so-called religious people, the priests, the theologians - they are also teaching you, `Be like Jesus, be like Buddha, be like Krishna.` Nobody ever tells you, `Just be yourself` - nobody. Everybody is against you, it seems. Nobody allows you to be yourself, nobody gives you any freedom. You can be in this world, but you must imitate somebody.

I think that one of Tim's great qualities and abilities is in what seems like a thumbnail sketch to get something quite telling, very simply, when you're doing it or being in that thumbnail sketch, you don't feel that it's important.

What Jazzy Jeff and rappers like him talk about is phony stuff. They're not into street raps, into telling what's really happening out there. They're talking about what the white world and the white kids can identity with.

When you're a politician, someone always wants something from you, so they're constantly telling you how smart or great you are, and that can warp people! Exercising humility is important to me. My friends back home treat me like the same person I was when I was waiting tables.

If a director brings a guy to their movie who does improv, they've got to let him do what he does - otherwise it's like bringing Michael Jordan to your basketball team and telling him to just pass the ball and don't shoot.

The bravery of Stanley Kramer's 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner' amounted to two Hollywood legends - Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy - telling the world that a black son-in-law is something they can live with, and so should you, especially if he looks like Sidney Poitier and has degrees.

Looking in a mirror and telling yourself to feel better doesn't work when you're a girl, but finding something that you love to do, something that makes you a better person like volunteering to help others, will definitely make a difference.

When I was in my early twenties, my mom started repeating things, asking the same questions, telling the same stories. It was like, 'Oh, God, this is not right.' When I was 25, my brother and I finally told our dad we had to take her to the doctor.

With Don Rickles and me, we're just telling the truth. We're not terrific people, and we're not gonna win the beauty contest. We're just average Joes. We're just being who we are, and I think people like that.

I remember for my 18th birthday, I was going to get a tattoo, and I made the mistake of thinking I was a man and telling my father, and he was like, 'Oh yeah? You better tattoo a new address on your arm, because you're not living here!' And that was the end of that discussion.

The idea is that Jodie Foster is with her child and she's going back to New York from Germany with her husband's body. She loses her child on a plane, and you think, 'How can that happen?' There's no record of her having brought a child onto the plane, and the captain is left wondering about whether she's telling the truth. You never really know if she's telling the truth or not.

I love to have a dinner party. I love to have people over. I like the feeling it creates in my home - having guests laughing and telling their stories - and I put a lot of thought into it. I plan my menu kind of depending on whatever mood I'm in.

A lot of my music is just self-observation. Like telling you, "Oh man. What did I just do? How much did I just pay for this chain? Why did I do that? Wait a minute." Let me talk about that. Or like, the temptation. Let me talk about that. Let me observe myself.

Michelle and I don't want anyone telling us who our family's doctor should be - and no one should decide that for you either. Under our proposals, if you like your doctor, you keep your doctor. If you like your current insurance, you keep that insurance. Period, end of story.

Appearing in 'Legally Blonde' has helped me find my inner girl, although at the beginning the director was constantly telling me off for sitting like a boy, with my legs apart, while wearing a cocktail dress and heels!

I have 60-plus videos on YouTube and over 30 million views. Of those 60, only three or four are branded videos. I built that audience by telling stories the way I like to tell them.