Anecdotes Quotes - Page 5

• Leonard Cohen can give you "Leonard Cohen" - the self-deprecating wit, the slow, considered speech, the perfectly-honed anecdote - Tom Waits is far more comfortable giving a journalist "Tom Waits" the character, whose conversation is really a series of strange tales, learned or ad-libbed.

  Sylvie Simmons

  Character, Self, Giving

  Source: thequietus.com

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• I don't have a lot of thrilling anecdotes about my career or personal life. All the stuff that is interesting is private and I wouldn't want people to know.

  Natalie Merchant

  Careers, People, Interesting

  "Paradise is here: an interview with Natalie Merchant". Interview with Gregg Shapiro, livingoutli.org. April 19, 2016.

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• Plutarch's peers were writing "rhetorics," which were these dry philosophical treatises that made really broad gestures about life and death and fate. Plutarch stepped out of the stream to create an essayistic form that relied on a digressive structure and down to earth anecdotes.

  John D'Agata

  Philosophical, Writing, Fate

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I tell this anecdote with tongue in cheek at the start of my book William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination, but my academic involvement with Burroughs was entirely due to my tutor at Oxford, Peter Conrad. I was discussing with him the idea of staying on to do graduate work and when I tossed the name of Burroughs into the conversation - well, he let it fall loudly onto the floor, and proceeded to cross himself as if warding off an evil spirit. Since I was very ambivalent about an academic career in any case, that decided it for me.

  Oliver Harris

  Book, Fall, Names

  Source: bigother.com

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• One of the things that I intend to devote a lot of time to in the coming years is continuing to try to move people's hearts and minds with humor, with stories, with anecdotes, with facts and information.

  Ted Cruz

  Moving, Heart, Years

  Interview with Glenn Thrush, www.politico.com. July 18, 2016.

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• [Barton ] Gellman printed a great anecdote: he showed two Google engineers a slide that showed how the NSA was doing this, and the engineers "exploded in profanity."

  Edward Snowden

  Two, Nsa, Google

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• You can deceive yourself into thinking that America is a technological leader, but if you don't see what anyone else is doing you have no accurate assessment - you can't make an accurate assessment of where you fit and why. I consider our moving frontier in space as the anecdote to that downward trend.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Moving, Thinking, Assessment

  Source: blog.sfgate.com

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• Every entrepreneur faces trade-offs when founding and growing their company. As we discovered at YouTube, those early decisions have far-reaching impacts and lead to unforeseen pitfalls down the road. Noam Wasserman uses vivid anecdotes and deep research to expertly outline the key early choices that define a startup, making The Founder's Dilemmas an invaluable alternative to real-world trial and error.

  Chad Hurley

  Real, Impact, Errors

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• Occasionally a single anecdote opens a character; biography has its comparative anatomy, and a saying or a sentiment enables the skilful hand to construct the skeleton.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Character, Skeletons, Hands

  Robert Aris Willmott (1858). “Summer Time in the Country”, p.44

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• The age-long history of thinking on gravitation, too, was erased from the collective consciousness, and that force somehow became the serendipitous child of Newton's genius. The new attitude is well illustrated by the anecdote of the apple, a legend spread by Voltaire, one of the most active and vehement erasers of the past. ... The need to build the myth of an ex nihilo creation of modern science gave rise to much impassioned rhetoric.

  Lucio Russo

  Children, Attitude, Past

  "The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn". Book by Lucio Russo, 2004.

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• An essay is a work of literary art which has a minimum of one anecdote and one universal idea.

  Carol Bly

  Art, Ideas, Literature

  Carol Bly (1990). “The passionate, accurate story: making your heart's truth into literature”

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• Nonfiction narratives are really powerful and valid in themselves. But one thing that you don't get sometimes from the more clinical or academic books or nonfiction books is that you don't get to hear the person's voice; you don't get them as individuals. You get a few quotes and you hear them as sort of a case study: numbers, examples, anecdotes, maybe a paragraph here, and that's about it.

  Dave Eggers

  Powerful, Book, Voice

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• Naturally, I mine my girlfriends lives for good anecdotes and stories - so many of their experiences find their way into my books.

  Lauren Weisberger

  Girlfriend, Book, Stories

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• Anecdotes generate questions, not answers.

  Steven Novella

  Answers

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• The short stories tend to be a journalistic gathering of anecdotes that are put together to make something larger.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Together, Stories, Gathering

  Source: www.nightmare-magazine.com

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• The earliest impetuses for writing, for me, were simply the strange things I happened to notice in my everyday life, stuff I read about in the grocery store tabloids my mom bought, situations that struck me as compelling, anecdotes I'd heard, images, words, metaphors.

  Dan Chaon

  Mom, Writing, Everyday

  Interview with Tom Barbash, www.believermag.com.

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• Baseball is more like a novel than a war. It is like an ongoing, hundred-year work of art, peopled with thousands of characters, full of improbable events, anecdotes, folklore and numbers.

  Luke Salisbury

  Baseball, Art, War

  Luke Salisbury (1990). “The answer is baseball: a book of questions that illuminate the great game”, Vintage Books

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• The dogs in our lives, the dogs we come to love and who (we fervently believe) love us in return, offer more than fidelity, consolation, and companionship. They offer comedy, irony, wit, and a wealth of anecdotes, the "shaggy dog stories" and "stupid pet tricks" that are commonplace pleasures of life.

  Marjorie Garber

  Dog, Stupid, Believe

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• And if a man reads very hard, as the old anecdote reminds us, he will have little time for thought.

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Men, Littles, Little Time

  Robert Louis Stevenson (1999). “The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays”, p.36, Cooper Square Press

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• Anecdote: The extent of Michael Jackson's fame at its height, and his eagerness to exploit it is shown by an incident in 1984 when invited to a White House reception hosted by then President and First Lady Ronald and Nancy Reagan. Jackson had been assured that the only people there, besides the presidential couple, would be a few staff members' children. Aghast to find around 75 adults and no children, Jackson locked himself in an upstairs bathroom, refusing to emerge until assured that all non-essential adults had been replaced by a number of children.

  Michael Jackson

  Children, Couple, White

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• Anecdote: A house that is rooted to one spot but can travel as quickly as you change your mind and is complete in itself is surely the most desirable of houses. Our modern house with its cumbersome walls and its foundations planted deep in the ground is nothing better than a prison and more and more prison like does it become the longer we live there, and wear fetters of a association and sentiment.

  Virginia Woolf

  Wall, House, Mind

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• Anecdotes, personal stories, reminiscences, like biblical parables, are the medium through which faith is restored. Stories are a form of poetry, and give us a saving image to personally relate to.

  Peter Block

  Biblical, Giving, Stories

  Peter Block (2003). “The Answer to How Is Yes: Acting on What Matters”, p.54, Berrett-Koehler Publishers

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• There is something about the creative process... which is that you can't talk about it. You try to think of anecdotes about it, and you try to explain, but you're never really saying what happened... it's a sort of happy accident.

  Betty Comden

  Creativity, Thinking, Creative

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• Something about the possession of a book - an object that can contain infinite fables, words of wisdom, chronicles of times gone by, humorous anecdotes and divine revelation - endows the reader with the power of creating a story, and the listener with a sense of being present at the moment of creation.

  Alberto Manguel

  Book, Humorous, Creating

  "A History of Reading". Book by Alberto Manguel, 1996.

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• (I am) dealing not with the particular anecdote, but rather with the Spirit of Myth, which is generic to all myths at all times.

  Mark Rothko

  Spirit, Myth, All Time

  "Abstract Expressionism". Book by David Anfam, Thames and Hudson Ltd London, p. 81, 1990.

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