American Quotes

The jam is moving toward the Capitol where Congress sits in judgment on all the administrative agencies of Government.

The first and continuing argument for the curtailment of working hours and the raising of the minimum age was that education was necessary in a democracy and working children could not attend school.

Sometimes when I get home at night in Washington I feel as though I had been in a great traffic jam.

I stand on the sidewalk watching it because the responsibility is mine and I must, I take a very firm hold on the handles of the baby carriage and I wheel it into the traffic.

Child labor and poverty are inevitably bound together and if you continue to use the labor of children as the treatment for the social disease of poverty, you will have both poverty and child labor to the end of time.

You never heard of a comedy team that didn't fight, did you?

Well, I always had a chauffer, because I have never driven a car in my life. I still can't drive.

That's why so many stars are making pictures in Europe today. The tax guys are making thieves out of everybody.

Sitting at home the way I do, I'd just love the hear from people. It'd be a great help in passing the time.

Once they get their hooks into you, you're a dead pigeon.

It gets so boring at home. After all, how many reruns of Abbott and Costello movies can a guy watch on television?

Now, on the St. Louis team we have Who's on first, What's on second, I Don't Know is on third.

They disallowed this and disallowed that, and now I can't even get my head above water!

They liked me so long as the liquor flowed at my house, but I haven't seen any of them around lately.

The challenge for me has first been to see things as they are, whether a portrait, a city street, or a bouncing ball. In a word, I have tried to be objective.

Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.

Does not the very word 'creative' mean to build, to initiate, to give out, to act - rather than to be acted upon, to be subjective? Living photography is positive in its approach, it sings a song of life - not death.

The camera is no more an instrument of preservation, the image is.

Photography helps people to see.

Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.

There are many teachers who could ruin you. Before you know it you could be a pale copy of this teacher or that teacher. You have to evolve on your own.

I didn't decide to be a photographer; I just happened to fall into it.

Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment.

One of my great passions is the collection of historical trivia.

Once you've invested hundreds of hours in creating a coherent universe, your story's grown to around a half-million words and can't be written as anything less than a trilogy.

No one uses a ribbon typewriter any more, but your final draft is not the time to try to wring a few more sheets out of your inkjet cartridge.

Neophyte writers tend to believe that there is something magical about ideas and that if they can just get a hold of a good one, then their futures are ensured.

My writing has to support more than my research habit, but I love to curl up with a book about some dusty corner of history.

It's possible to become so comfortable with one's style and structure that one ceases to grow.

It's been a long time since I've written old-fashioned sword and sorcery; I'm hoping it's like riding a bicycle.