Screenwriter

🇫🇷Oscar Wilde

Literature

Aestheticism

1854–1900

"A poet can survive everything but a misprint."

🇺🇸Ernest Hemingway

Literature

1899–1961

"'Why, you sad son-of-a-bitch, how can you be so cocky and stand there and block cars when you're nothing but a miserable bear and a black bear at that - not even a polar or a grizzly or anything worth while.'"

Nelson Mandela

Politics

1918–2013

"I watched, along with all of you, as the tens of thousands of our people stood patiently in long queues for many hours. Some sleeping on the open ground overnight waiting to cast this momentous vote."

🇫🇷Jean-Paul Sartre

Philosophy

Existentialism

1905–1980

"Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk."

🇺🇸Carl Sagan

Science

1934–1996

"Evolving before our eyes has been a God of the Gaps; that is, whatever it is we cannot explain lately is attributed to God."

🇺🇸Philip Roth

Literature

1933–2018

"The New York Times Featured Author: Philip Roth"

Slavoj Žižek

Philosophy

Lacanianism

b. 1949

"I may still be a kind of a Marxist but I'm very realistic, I don't have these dreams of revolutions around the corner."

🇦🇷Jorge Luis Borges

Literature

1899–1986

"I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited."

🇮🇹Umberto Eco

Literature

1932–2016

"I don't miss my youth. I'm glad I had one, but I wouldn't like to start over."

🇺🇸Thomas Mann

Literature

"Six months at most after they get here, these young people — and they are mostly young who come — have lost every idea they had, except flirtation and temperature."

🇨🇴Gabriel García Márquez

Literature

magic realism

1927–2014

"But that afternoon he asked himself, with his infinite capacity for illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love."

🇫🇷James Baldwin

Social Activism

1924–1987

"Bedford-St. Martin's Baldwin essay page links"

🇬🇧Aldous Huxley

Literature

1894–1963

"Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare it is simply disgraceful."

🇺🇸Maya Angelou

Literature

1928–2014

"First best is falling in love. Second best is being in love. Least best is falling out of love. But any of it is better than never having been in love."

🇺🇸F. Scott Fitzgerald

Literature

modernism

1896–1940

"Think how you love me," she whispered. "I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night."

🇺🇸Gore Vidal

Literature

postmodern literature

1925–2012

"I'm not a conspiracy theorist - I'm a conspiracy analyst."

🇮🇪Samuel Beckett

Literature

Nouveau Roman

1906–1989

"Does one ever know oneself why one laughs?"

🇺🇸John Steinbeck

Literature

1902–1968

"This monster of a land, this mightiest of nations, this spawn of the future, turns out to be the macrocosm of microcosm me."

🇬🇧Richard Dawkins

Science

atheism

b. 1941

"Eugenics was not inspired by Darwin's natural selection but by ancient agricultural ARTIFICIAL selection. Eugenics is UNnatural selection."

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Literature

1918–2008

"Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice."

🇺🇸Don DeLillo

Literature

b. 1936

"It was important for him to believe that he'd spent his life among people who kept missing the point."

🇨🇦William Shatner

Entertainment

b. 1931

"A friend of mine suffered from COPD. That's why I wanted to let you know about Inogen, a new way to have oxygen anytime, anywhere. Look into the difference Inogen can make for you."

🇺🇸Bruce Willis

Psychology

b. 1955

"I'm staggered by the question of what it's like to be a multimillionaire. I always have to remind myself that I am."

🇬🇧Ian McKellen

Literature

b. 1939

"Heterosexuality is far too interesting a phenomenon to be ignored."

🇺🇸LeBron James

Sports

b. 1984

"Crazy. Karma is a bitch. Gets you every time. It's not good to wish bad on anybody. God sees everything!"

🇬🇧Rowan Atkinson

Entertainment

b. 1955

"All jokes about religion cause offence, so it's pointless apologising for them."

🇬🇧Sacha Baron Cohen

Entertainment

b. 1971

"Which is the funniest language? It's French, isn't it?"

🇺🇸Tom Cruise

Literature

b. 1962

"There was a time I went through , I said, you know what, when I read it, I just thought 'Whoa', this is it. This is exactly it."

🇺🇸Paul Bettany

Entertainment

b. 1971

"Because it doesn't happen like this, where we're having an interview and it sort of turns into a conversation--and a quite gratifying one, because it's all about me."

🇺🇸Clint Eastwood

Entertainment

b. 1930

"I've actually had people come up to me and ask me to autograph their guns."

🇨🇦Catherine O'Hara

Entertainment

1954–2026

"Why work alone if you don’t have to? It’s all give and take. It’s all about listening to others and contributing. Even if you didn’t want to act, improv classes are great, because they teach you about conversation."

🇺🇸Sylvester Stallone

Entertainment

b. 1946

"The films are realistic fantasies. Bullets are easy. You can buy them. Emotions are not. They're priceless."

🇺🇸Stephen King

Literature

b. 1986

"Born in Lust, Turn to Dust. Born in Sin, Come on In"

🇺🇸Harry Houdini

Literature

1874–1926

"I'm tired of fighting, Dash. I guess this thing is going to get me."

🇺🇸Tim Burton

Entertainment

b. 1958

"Son, are you happy? I don't mean to pry,but do you dream of Heaven?Have you ever wanted to die?"

🇺🇸Leonard Nimoy

Entertainment

1931–2015

"I’m much more emotional than Mr. Spock. Spock rarely betrays what he is thinking or feeling. He’s fun to portray. But I hope I won’t explode one of these days."

🇺🇸Dolly Parton

Music

b. 1946

"I look so totally artificial, but I’ve always been the simplest person in the world."

🇺🇸Kirk Douglas

Entertainment

1916–2020

"I love champions. A champion has something special about him."

🇺🇸Vladimir Nabokov

Literature

modernism

1912–1977

"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness."