Alvin Toffler Quotes
American - Author October 4, 1928 - June 27, 2016

The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn.
Alvin Toffler

You can use all the quantitative data you can get, but you still have to distrust it and use your own intelligence and judgment.
Alvin Toffler

Our technological powers increase, but the side effects and potential hazards also escalate.
Alvin Toffler

You've got to think about big things while you're doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction.
Alvin Toffler

It is better to err on the side of daring than the side of caution.
Alvin Toffler

One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we'll need a new definition.
Alvin Toffler

Parenthood remains the greatest single preserve of the amateur.
Alvin Toffler

Future shock is the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.
Alvin Toffler

Technology feeds on itself. Technology makes more technology possible.
Alvin Toffler

The next major explosion is going to be when genetics and computers come together. I'm talking about an organic computer - about biological substances that can function like a semiconductor.
Alvin Toffler

Change is not merely necessary to life - it is life.
Alvin Toffler

Nobody knows the future with certainty. We can, however, identify ongoing patterns of change.
Alvin Toffler

We must search out totally new ways to anchor ourselves, for all the old roots religion, nation, community, family, or profession are now shaking under the hurricane impact of the accelerative thrust.
Alvin Toffler

We futurists have a magic button. We follow every statement about a failed forecast with 'yet.'
Alvin Toffler

To think that the new economy is over is like somebody in London in 1830 saying the entire industrial revolution is over because some textile manufacturers in Manchester went broke.
Alvin Toffler

Knowledge is the most democratic source of power.
Alvin Toffler

Man has a limited biological capacity for change. When this capacity is overwhelmed, the capacity is in future shock.
Alvin Toffler

The great growling engine of change - technology.
Alvin Toffler

The biggest tragedy I had was the loss of my daughter from neuromuscular disease in 2000, at age 46.
Alvin Toffler

Anyone nit-picking enough to write a letter of correction to an editor doubtless deserves the error that provoked it.
Alvin Toffler

Profits, like sausages... are esteemed most by those who know least about what goes into them.
Alvin Toffler

The Law of Raspberry Jam: the wider any culture is spread, the thinner it gets.
Alvin Toffler

Most managers were trained to be the thing they most despise - bureaucrats.
Alvin Toffler

I work virtually every waking hour.
Alvin Toffler

My wife and I, unlike many intellectuals, spent five years working on assembly lines. We came to fully understand the criticisms of the industrial age, in which you are an appendage of a machine that sets the pace.
Alvin Toffler

One of the more fantastic possibilities is that man will be able to make biological carbon copies of himself.
Alvin Toffler

One of the more fantastic possibilities is that man will be able to make biological carbon copies of himself.
Alvin Toffler

No serious futurist deals in prediction. These are left for television oracles and newspaper astrologers.
Alvin Toffler


Jackie Collins Quotes
British - Author October 4, 1937 - September 19, 2015

My weakness is wearing too much leopard print.
Jackie Collins

I know that I am very popular in Holland, in fact I have visited Amsterdam several times to publicize my books. I have a great publisher in Holland and they have published all of my books in Dutch.
Jackie Collins

If you want to achieve your dreams, you must follow them, and the best way to follow them is not to think about wanting to be very rich, but to think about doing something that you really want to do.
Jackie Collins

I have considered rap music stars, and there is one in my new book, Lovers and Players, and there is also a hip-hop music mogul who I think you will like a lot.
Jackie Collins

Who is ready to settle for five minutes when three hours does nicely?
Jackie Collins

I really fall in love with my characters, even the bad ones. I love getting together with them. They tell me what to do; they take me on a wild and wonderful trip.
Jackie Collins

The husbands, who sometimes have another family who's grown, are going, Now I can spend time with my baby. Oh yeah, I bet your other family is really thrilled.
Jackie Collins

The biggest critics of my books are people who never read them.
Jackie Collins

I write about real people in disguise. If anything, my characters are toned down-the truth is much more bizarre.
Jackie Collins

My philosophy is, unless you're sick and need help, why bother?
Jackie Collins

Brittany Murphy... who knows if she's going to be around. Kirsten Dunst, I think she's really boring. Reese Witherspoon? She can open a movie.
Jackie Collins

Where was Paris Hilton a year ago? She's a fabulous character to write about.
Jackie Collins

I think I'm a born storyteller. Inspiration is all around me. I can read a newspaper article and come up with an idea for a book.
Jackie Collins

I don't believe in writing anything that I don't know about or haven't researched about personally. I like to transport the reader to places, and in order to do that I have to do the research.
Jackie Collins

I was never confident about finishing a book, but friends encouraged me. When I finished my first book, it was accepted by a publisher right away and became an instant bestseller. One male critic called it the most shocking book he ever read.
Jackie Collins

I am still shocking people today, and I don't know why. Is it because I'm a woman talking about sex and men? One magazine said that no one writes sex in the back of a Bentley better than Jackie Collins.
Jackie Collins

I write synopses after the book is completed. I can't write it beforehand, because I don't know what the book's about. I invent something for my publisher because he asks for one, but the final book ends up very differently.
Jackie Collins

I write about the American dream: if you set your mind to do something, you can do it. My fans know they're getting the real thing.
Jackie Collins

I have written 20 books, and each one is like having a baby. Writing is not easy; some people want to write books but just can't put a story together. I can put together a story that interests both me and my readers.
Jackie Collins

I managed to take a family trip to the Bahamas and it was quite lovely.
Jackie Collins

I have visited Australia several times, and I always try to make a point of going to Melbourne because it's almost my favorite city there, Melbourne and Sydney. But I shouldn't say that because I haven't been everywhere-and I'm very fond of Perth too!
Jackie Collins

Ideas are all around me. If I wasn't interested in them myself, I don't think anyone else would be either.
Jackie Collins

Authors change publishers because it's like being married for a long time and suddenly you want to go out and have a wild affair! No, not seriously, sometimes the deal is more interesting with a new publisher, and other times they have more enthusiasm for your books.
Jackie Collins

All of my books have the potential to become movies, it's just a question of finding a studio who wants to get behind me and put up the money to make the movie.
Jackie Collins

I am currently talking to one of the studios about making American Star as a TV series.
Jackie Collins

You've got your hands full if you have three children under 2 years old.
Jackie Collins

Whatever you have a passion for, then you must do. If you want to write, write about something you know about.
Jackie Collins

Agents are essential, because publishers will not read unsolicited manuscripts.
Jackie Collins

Do not copy my style! The first rule of writing is write about what you know, not what you think you know. So, think about what you've done in your life and write about that.
Jackie Collins

People are intrigued by fame, power and wealth and I think Hollywood is the only place where you get all three together.
Jackie Collins

I have this theory that people in Hollywood don't read. They read 'Vanity Fair' and then consider themselves terribly well read. I think I can basically write about anybody without getting caught.
Jackie Collins


Roy Blount, Jr. Quotes
American - Writer Born: October 4, 1941

According to scholars of linguistics, the relation between a word and its meaning is arbitrary.
Roy Blount, Jr.

When I weed, I like to get off into my own head. For one thing, my wife plants and I have trouble telling which plants are weeds and which are my favorite plants. So I tend to hop around and grab the weeds that I know are weeds. So I don't weed all that linearly. I tend to weed haphazardly.
Roy Blount, Jr.

Think about scary movies: There's a fine line between horror and humor.
Roy Blount, Jr.

A good heavy book holds you down. It's an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic.
Roy Blount, Jr.

Anyone who undertakes the literary grind had better like playing around with words.
Roy Blount, Jr.

The last time somebody said, 'I find I can write much better with a word processor.', I replied, 'They used to say the same thing about drugs.'
Roy Blount, Jr.

Studying literature at Harvard is like learning about women at the Mayo clinic.
Roy Blount, Jr.

Being president of too many well-meaning organizations put my father into an early grave. The lesson in this was not lost on me.
Roy Blount, Jr.

English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies.
Roy Blount, Jr.

I just think lots of words have physicality. How about the word 'wobble?' You think that's arbitrary? When you say the word 'wince,' you wince. How about that?
Roy Blount, Jr.

I studied French in high school and German in college and I once took a 24-hour Italian crash course. English has by far the most words in it of any other language. Our money might not be worth anything anymore, but the language is.
Roy Blount, Jr.

When money gets too far away from actual, physical, real equity and property it gets too abstract and too distantly derived and then suddenly it's not worth anything anymore. And the same is true of language.
Roy Blount, Jr.

I do some eccentric dancing.
Roy Blount, Jr.

I heard on public radio recently, there's a thing called Weed Dating. Singles get together in a garden and weed and then they take turns, they keep matching up with other people. Two people will weed down one row and switch over with two other people. It's in Vermont. I don't think I'd be very good at Weed Dating.
Roy Blount, Jr.

I like weeding, but I tend to think of it as a solitary activity.
Roy Blount, Jr.

To me, letters have always been a robust medium of sublimation. I don't remember what I was like before I learned my ABC's, but for as long as I can remember I have made them with my fingers and felt them in my bones.
Roy Blount, Jr.

I have written some of the clumsiest, most clogged-yet-vagrant, hobbledehoyish, hitch-slipping sentences ever conceived by the human mind.
Roy Blount, Jr.

Somebody informed me recently that the key to every art, from writing to gardening to sculpture, is creativity. I beg to differ.
Roy Blount, Jr.

The more you try to pin a word down, the more you realize that it has its own cape, sword and little hat.
Roy Blount, Jr.

We don't want bookstores to die. Authors need them, and so do neighborhoods.
Roy Blount, Jr.

Get your friends together, go to your local bookstore and have a book-buying party.
Roy Blount, Jr.

There will be birthdays in the next twelve months; books keep well; they're easy to wrap: buy those books now. Buy replacements for any books looking raggedy on your shelves.
Roy Blount, Jr.

People may think of Southern humor in terms of missing teeth and outhouse accidents, but the best of it is a rich vein running through the best of Southern literature.
Roy Blount, Jr.