Robert Wise Quotes
American - Producer September 10, 1914 - September 14, 2005

You can't tell any kind of a story without having some kind of a theme, something to say between the lines.
Robert Wise

My three Ps: passion, patience, perseverance. You have to do this if you've got to be a filmmaker.
Robert Wise

The Sand Pebbles has always been one of my favorite films, I suppose because its the most difficult film - from a physical and logistical standpoint - that I've ever made.
Robert Wise

Of all the stars whom I worked with, I think Steve knew better what worked for him on the screen than any other. He had such a sense of what he could register, and that helped a lot in terms of shaping the character and the script.
Robert Wise

You look back on films sometimes and if they have not been as all-out successful as you anticipated you try to find reasons why maybe it didn't come off for audiences as well as you would have liked.
Robert Wise

I think one of the major things a director has to do is to know his subject matter, the subject matter of his script, know the truth and the reality of it. That's very important.
Robert Wise

You know, people always think if you start out as a film editor, you shoot less footage. Actually, just the opposite is true. I tend to grab as much coverage as I can because as a former editor I know how important it is to have those few frames.
Robert Wise

As I've always said, preproduction is so important. When you cast the actors, you've done much of the work. Now, you may need to guide them a little, take it up or down, have them go faster or slower, but the casting process is crucial.
Robert Wise

A Mac is a closed box, so Apple can make decisions about things that they don't include. That makes, it in some ways, simpler for them.
Robert Wise

I've always been proud of being a Hoosier. When I talk to people, I tell them that.
Robert Wise


Charles Kuralt Quotes
American - Journalist September 10, 1934 - July 4, 1997


Good teachers know how to bring out the best in students.
Charles Kuralt

The love of family and the admiration of friends is much more important than wealth and privilege.
Charles Kuralt

I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading.
Charles Kuralt

There are a lot of people who are doing wonderful things, quietly, with no motive of greed, or hostility toward other people, or delusions of superiority.
Charles Kuralt

I recognize that I had a good deal of good luck in my life. I came along at a time when it was pretty easy to get a job in journalism. I went to work at CBS News when I was about 22, and within a year or so was reporting on the air.
Charles Kuralt

You can find your way across this country using burger joints the way a navigator uses stars.
Charles Kuralt

I used to think that driving, sleepless, ambitious labor was what you needed to succeed.
Charles Kuralt

Since my retirement, I've spent a lot of time trying to help the School of Social Work at the University of North Carolina. A society like this just can't afford an uneducated underclass of citizens.
Charles Kuralt

The everyday kindness of the back roads more than makes up for the acts of greed in the headlines.
Charles Kuralt

It's best to leap into something you know you love. You might change your mind later, but that is the privilege of youth.
Charles Kuralt

Just by luck, I picked good heroes to worship.
Charles Kuralt

The first books I was interested in were all about baseball. But I can't think of one single book that changed my life in any way.
Charles Kuralt

When I was a little boy I used to borrow my father's hat, and make a press card to stick in the hat band. That was the way reporters were always portrayed in the movies.
Charles Kuralt

It does no harm just once in a while to acknowledge that the whole country isn't in flames, that there are people in the country besides politicians, entertainers, and criminals.
Charles Kuralt

I can't remember a time when I didn't want to be a reporter. I don't know where I got the idea that it was a romantic calling.
Charles Kuralt

When we become a really mature, grown-up, wise society, we will put teachers at the center of the community, where they belong. We don't honor them enough, we don't pay them enough.
Charles Kuralt

Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything.
Charles Kuralt

We always take credit for the good and attribute the bad to fortune.
Charles Kuralt

I could tell you which writer's rhythms I am imitating. It's not exactly plagiarism, it's falling in love with good language and trying to imitate it.
Charles Kuralt

There is such a thing as a national conscience, and it can be touched.
Charles Kuralt

A country so rich that it can send people to the moon still has hundreds of thousands of its citizens who can't read. That's terribly troubling to me.
Charles Kuralt

For a while there, I was a stringer. The expression comes from the old habit of stringing together the column inches that you had written. They'd measure it and pay you 10 cents an inch for your printed copy.
Charles Kuralt

I can't say that I've changed anybody's life, ever, and that's the real work of the world, if you want a better society.
Charles Kuralt

I didn't like the competitiveness of big-time journalism.
Charles Kuralt

I don't have any well-developed philosophy about journalism. Ultimately it is important in a society like this, so people can know about everything that goes wrong.
Charles Kuralt

I don't think I had a reputation as a hard worker, but inside I was always being eaten up by the pressures.
Charles Kuralt

I don't think one should ever come to my stage of life and have to look back and say, Gosh. I wish I hadn't spent all those years doing that job I was never really interested in.
Charles Kuralt

I had a little insight into life that most kids probably didn't have. My mother was a schoolteacher, and my father was a social worker. Through his eyes I saw the underside of society.
Charles Kuralt

I remember being in the public library and my jaw just aching as I looked around at all those books I wanted to read. There just wasn't time enough to read everything I wanted to read.
Charles Kuralt

I saw how many people were poor and how many kids my age went to school hungry in the morning, which I don't think most of my contemporaries in racially segregated schools in the South thought very much about at the time.
Charles Kuralt

I suppose I was a little bit of what would be called today a nerd. I didn't have girlfriends, and really I wasn't a very social boy.
Charles Kuralt

I think all those people I did stories about measured their own success by the joy their work was giving them.
Charles Kuralt

I think I'd have done better if I had been a little more relaxed-if I had not pressed quite so hard, if I'd not lost quite so much sleep.
Charles Kuralt

I wasn't a very discriminating reader. I read just about everything that came along.
Charles Kuralt

I would love to write something that people would still read 50 or 100 years from now. That comes with growing older, I think.
Charles Kuralt

I'm not any kind of social reformer.
Charles Kuralt

In television, everything is gone with the speed of light, literally. It is no field for anybody with intimations of immortality.
Charles Kuralt

It was so much fun to have the freedom to wander America, with no assignments. For 25 or 30 years I never had an assignment. These were all stories I wanted to do myself.
Charles Kuralt

Kids are always asked, What are you going to be when you grow up? I needed an answer. So instead of saying, a fireman, or a policeman, I said, a reporter.
Charles Kuralt

Look for joy in your life; it's not always easy to find.
Charles Kuralt

My mother, at least twice, cancelled our family's subscription to the newspaper I was working on, because she was so mad about its treatment of my father.
Charles Kuralt

My parents encouraged me in everything I ever wanted to do.
Charles Kuralt

Now that I look back on it, having retired from being a reporter, it was kind of romantic. It was a wonderful way to live one's life, just as I imagined it would be when I was 6 or 7.
Charles Kuralt

TV critics, who traditionally hate television and make their living writing about it, often didn't like what I did on the air.
Charles Kuralt

When I worked in Los Angeles covering hard news, very often when something important would happen I'd be off in the woods covering something unimportant, which was more interesting to me.
Charles Kuralt


Mary Oliver Quotes
American - Poet Born: September 10, 1935

Because of the dog's joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift. It is not the least reason why we should honor as love the dog of our own life, and the dog down the street, and all the dogs not yet born.
Mary Oliver

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
Mary Oliver

I have a notion that if you are going to be spiritually curious, you better not get cluttered up with too many material things.
Mary Oliver

When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
Mary Oliver

Animals praise a good day, a good hunt. They praise rain if they're thirsty. That's prayer. They don't live an unconscious life, they simply have no language to talk about these things. But they are grateful for the good things that come along.
Mary Oliver

I consider myself kind of a reporter - one who uses words that are more like music and that have a choreography. I never think of myself as a poet; I just get up and write.
Mary Oliver

Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.
Mary Oliver

To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.
Mary Oliver

To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.
Mary Oliver

There were times over the years when life was not easy, but if you're working a few hours a day and you've got a good book to read, and you can go outside to the beach and dig for clams, you're okay.
Mary Oliver

So this is how you swim inward. So this is how you flow outwards. So this is how you pray.
Mary Oliver

The woods that I loved as a child are entirely gone. The woods that I loved as a young adult are gone. The woods that most recently I walked in are not gone, but they're full of bicycle trails.
Mary Oliver

I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing.
Mary Oliver

I grew up in a confused house: too much unwanted attention or none at all.
Mary Oliver

I was very careful never to take an interesting job. If you have an interesting job, you get interested in it.
Mary Oliver

In college, you learn how to learn. Four years is not too much time to spend at that.
Mary Oliver

Sometimes breaking the rules is extending the rules.
Mary Oliver

You can fool a lot of yourself but you can't fool the soul.
Mary Oliver

Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.
Mary Oliver

I'm going to die one day. I know it's coming for me, too. I'll be a mountain, I'll be a stone on the beach. I'll be nourishment.
Mary Oliver

We all have a hungry heart, and one of the things we hunger for is happiness. So as much as I possibly could, I stayed where I was happy.
Mary Oliver

Walks work for me. I enter some arena that is neither conscious or unconscious.
Mary Oliver

I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us.
Mary Oliver

To tell you the truth, I believe everything - tigers, trees, stones - are sentient in one way or another. You'd never catch me idly kicking a stone, for example.
Mary Oliver

As a child, what captivated me was reading the poems myself and realizing that there was a world without material substance which was nevertheless as alive as any other.
Mary Oliver

Writers sometimes give up what is most strange and wonderful about their writing - soften their roughest edges - to accommodate themselves toward a group response.
Mary Oliver

Apparently, I've been considered a recluse.
Mary Oliver

I had a very dysfunctional family, and a very hard childhood. So I made a world out of words. And it was my salvation.
Mary Oliver

I'd rather write about polar bears than people.
Mary Oliver

Almost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want to be there. It is not even a walk we take together.
Mary Oliver

I think one thing is that prayer has become more useful, interesting, fruitful, and... almost involuntary in my life.
Mary Oliver

I know the sag of the unfinished poem. And I know the release of the poem that is finished.
Mary Oliver

I worked probably 25 years by myself, just writing and working, not trying to publish much, not giving readings.
Mary Oliver

It's very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down. I can't wait until morning - it'll be gone.
Mary Oliver

I went to India and was quite taken with it. There's a feeling there that things are holy first and useful second.
Mary Oliver

I simply do not distinguish between work and play.
Mary Oliver

My first two books are out of print and, okay, they can sleep there comfortably. It's early work, derivative work.
Mary Oliver

If I've done my work well, I vanish completely from the scene. I believe it is invasive of the work when you know too much about the writer.
Mary Oliver

I have a notebook with me all the time, and I begin scribbling a few words. When things are going well, the walk does not get anywhere; I finally just stop and write.
Mary Oliver

We all have a hungry heart, and one of the things we hunger for is happiness. So as much as I possibly could, I stayed where I was happy. I spent a great deal of time in my younger years just writing and reading, walking around the woods in Ohio, where I grew up.
Mary Oliver

I very much wished not to be noticed, and to be left alone, and I sort of succeeded.
Mary Oliver

It's very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down.
Mary Oliver

To find a new word that is accurate and different, you have to be alert for it.
Mary Oliver

One thing I do know is that poetry, to be understood, must be clear.
Mary Oliver

I decided very early that I wanted to write. But I didn't think of it as a career. I didn't even think of it as a profession... It was the most exciting thing, the most powerful thing, the most wonderful thing to do with my life.
Mary Oliver

I worked privately, and sometimes I feel that might be better for poets than the kind of social workshop gathering. My school was the great poets: I read, and I read, and I read.
Mary Oliver

There is nothing better than work. Work is also play; children know that. Children play earnestly as if it were work. But people grow up, and they work with a sorrow upon them. It's duty.
Mary Oliver

People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.
Mary Oliver

My parents didn't care very much what I did, and that was probably a blessing.
Mary Oliver

I've always wanted to write poems and nothing else.
Mary Oliver

I have the feeling that a lot of poets writing now are - they sort of tap dance through it.
Mary Oliver

I always feel that whatever isn't necessary shouldn't be in a poem.
Mary Oliver

Writers must... take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems.
Mary Oliver

Wasn't it Emerson who said, 'My life is for itself and not for a spectacle'? I have a happy, full, good life because I hold it private.
Mary Oliver

I would rather write poems than prose, any day, any place. Yet each has its own force.
Mary Oliver

Instead of taking the reader by the hand and running him down the hill, I want to lead him into a house of many rooms, and leave him alone in each of them.
Mary Oliver

Words have not only a definition... but also the felt quality of their own kind of sound.
Mary Oliver

I read Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet, every day.
Mary Oliver

The challenge is to keep up with all the new poets at the same time I love the old ones.
Mary Oliver

I like books that are fat and full.
Mary Oliver

Believe me, if anybody has a job and starts at 9, there's no reason why they can't get up at 4:30 or five and write for a couple of hours, and give their employers their second-best effort of the day - which is what I did.
Mary Oliver

At the time I was growing up, literature was involved with the so-called confessional poets. And I was not interested in that. I did not think that specific and personal perspective functioned well for the reader at all.
Mary Oliver

I learn a lot about my poems when I read them by the way people respond to them.
Mary Oliver

Poetry is meant to be heard.
Mary Oliver