Block Quotes - Page 52

I don't get writer's block. I don't try to write anything; when something comes, I write it. I just practice and when I get an idea I write it down.

Unlike some of my peers, I haven't really hit a writer's block. When I hit a block I just paint, which is an old crop rotation trick.

For want of a block, man will stumble at a straw.

What the meat industry figured out is that you don't need healthy animals to make a profit. Sick animals are more profitable... Factory farms calculate how close to death they can keep animals without killing them. That's the business model. How quickly they can be made to grow, how tightly they can be packed, how much or how little can they eat, how sick they can get without dying...We live in a world in which it's conventional to treat an animal like a block of wood.

There are two kinds of sculptures. There's the kind that subtracts: Michelangelo starts with a block of marble and chips away. And then there is the kind that adds, building with clay, piling it on. The way I write novels is to keep piling on and piling on and piling on.

Being blocked, being uncertain, sitting there not knowing, waiting, abiding with it: this is the work. If you don't have the tolerance for that you're in great trouble. If you want to call it a writer's block... that doesn't seem a very useful name for that kind of abiding that I think is the essence of the work.

Books aren’t just my defenses, the sandbags I use to fortify my position; they are also the building blocks of my soul, and I am the sum of all I read.

I hesitate to say yes - I had writer's block, because I know there are people who've had really serious cases of it, and I've never been paralyzed like that, but I definitely get blocked sometimes. More than periods where I don't write anything, I have periods where I just write junk and I know I'm writing junk but I can't stop.

Nothing highlights better the continuing gap between rhetoric and substance in British financial services than the failure of providers here to emulate Jack Bogle's index fund success in the United States. Every professional in the City knows that index funds should be core building blocks in any long-term investor's portfolio. Since 1976, the Vanguard index funds has produced a compound annual return of 12 percent, better than three-quarters of its peer group.

Americans have an extraordinary love-hate relationship with the rich culture they've created. They buy, watch and read it even as they ban, block and condemn it.

Marriage is all about knowing the ins and outs and the intimate details, and your wife is supposed to be the person you know best. But my brother and I think alike, know everything about one another, and when we get together, we block everything else out. Nothing exists in our world except for us.

Some people talk of writer's block - you got all of these ideas but nothing happens. The truth is, there's no such thing as writer's block. It's to the degree that you want to write. The thing is that these things show up whenever they feel like it.

Just the thought of anybody saying that Obama was the one who divided us when the Republican leadership started out saying we're going to block everything he tries to do - and they were very successful at that, but they couldn't keep him from doing everything. So thank God for his hard work.

I was a good surfer because we grew up a block from the water, and my father took us to the ocean the way other fathers take their kids to the park.

I'm not 'Blockbuster Boy.' I never wanted to be. I wasn't looking for that.

I like vinyl because it's not quite random access. You have to pick up the needle, flip the record. I do think that an 18-20 minute block of music is sacred, and I can see why it's catching on. I really don't know if it will stay, but it's such a bizarre world, I think it's possible.

The prevailing tendency to regard all the marked distinctions of human character as innate, and in the main indelible, and to ignore the irresistible proofs that by far the greater part of those differences, whether between individuals, races, or sexes are such as not only might but naturally would be produced by differences in circumstances, is one of the chief hinderances to the rational treatment of great social questions, and one of the greatest stumbling blocks to human improvement.

Maybe, I got a sense when [Star Wars] came out, and there were always these lines around the block. We didn't understand the popularity of Cheers until maybe five years into the series.

I mean, we were hearing music all the way through the islands. You know, we, when we visit the islands, of course since the islands have been churches have come down, there's a church every two blocks. And so there's music in all these different denominations. So we said, music's gotta play a big part of this movie [Maona] to really capture the culture.

This is not to say there are not Chicagoans. But I would suggest that they are a nomadic people, whose lost home exists only in their minds, and in the glowing crystal memory cells they all carry in the palms of their hands: a great idea of a second city, lit with life and love, reasonable drink prices at cool bars, and, of course, blocks and blocks of bright and devastating fire.

This use of building blocks to generate internal models is a pervasive feature of complex adaptive systems.

When a new building block is discovered, the result is usually a range of innovations.

Particular individuals do not recur, but their building blocks do.

We must uphold the promise of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, and Clinton and never allow the President and his Republican friends to threaten Social Security by putting it on the Wall Street trading block.

Time has an undertaking establishment on every block and drives his coffin nails faster than the steam riveters rivet or the stenographers type or the tickers tick out fours and eights and dollar signs and ciphers.