Useful Quotes

The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.

I am convinced that in the upcoming chapter of the struggle, I can be more useful to the inevitable change that will soon come to Cuba, to Cuba's freedom, as a private citizen dedicated to helping the heroes within Cuba.

One is to ensure that the war fighters and the intelligence analysts get the information that they need when they need it, in a format that's useful to them.

Shall I give you my recipe for happiness? I find everything useful and nothing indispensable. I find everything wonderful and nothing miraculous. I reverence the body. I avoid first causes like the plague.

What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it. Dull to the contemporary who reads it and invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it.

Leisure is the time for doing something useful. This leisure the diligent person will obtain the lazy one never.

Money is only useful when you get rid of it. It is like the odd card in "Old Maid"; the player who is finally left with it has lost.

The characters you refer to as predatory and unsavory are useful. They're the ones who make a novel into a thriller. They're active, and most of the common virtues, the signs of a good person, are not.

I tried to instill a different motivation, to give them the security and the conviction that they were doing something good, something necessary, something useful - if you want to use a grandiose expression, that they were doing something for peace.

I mean, certainly writing, painting, photography, dance, architecture, there is an aspect of almost every art form that is useful and that merges into film in some way.

I used to wish there was a useful term for those of us who thought American power should be used to remove psychopathic dictators.

Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.

Acting has been very useful to me.

There are few things more pleasing than the contemplation of order and useful arrangement.

I tend to discourage people from calling me 'Sir Ian,' because I don't like being separated out from the rest of the population. Of course, it can be useful if you're writing an official letter, like trying to get a visa or something passed through Parliament. They're impressed by these things.

There are few ironclad rules of diplomacy but to one there is no exception. When an official reports that talks were useful, it can safely be concluded that nothing was accomplished.

Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.

I'd like to do a television show that is encouraging, useful, and clean, and I'd like to go up against Entertainment Tonight and beat it.

But I still do believe that there are useful things to say about Elvis Presley, including what his own ordinariness as a poor Southerner says about 20th-century hero-making.

For purposes of action nothing is more useful than narrowness of thought combined with energy of will.

I thank fate for having made me born poor. Poverty taught me the true value of the gifts useful to life.

The thought grew strong in me that since I had gone to the trouble of being born, I might as well be useful in helping people live long and healthy lives. And this thought has always resided in the back of my mind.

It is useful to the historian, among others, to be able to see the commonest forms of different phenomena, whether phonetic, morphological or other, and how language lives, carries on and changes over time.

Sometimes when you're going fast, your instincts can be very useful.

Religions do a useful thing: they narrow God to the limits of man. Philosophy replies by doing a necessary thing: it elevates man to the plane of God.

A certain number of Americans are already in Peking and most of us here feel that it would be very useful for the United States and especially for the Left-wing progressive movement in the United States if groups of students such as you mention could make a tour of China.

The utmost thing is the user experience, to have the most useful experience.

All these stories are grist to the mill of the government because they build up a very useful war psychosis.

I learned how to fire a sniper rifle, which I'm sure will be useful at some point.

A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.