All Quotes

'The Secret Agent,' Joseph Conrad's 1907 novel about an anarchist plot to blow up the Royal Observatory at Greenwich - in fact, a scheme by a secret police agent to stir up a government backlash - has acquired a kind of cult status as the classic novel for the post-9/11 age.
‐‐ Tom Reiss

'The Secret Agent' remains the most brilliant novelistic study of terrorism as viewed from the blood-spattered outside. But 'Under Western Eyes' dares to leap inside - not only into the terrorist mind, but also into the troubled zone that divides West from East, 'the autocracy in mystic vestments.'
‐‐ Tom Reiss

The secret at the heart of 'The Memory Keeper's Daughter' is something everybody, except for some of the characters, knows in Chapter 1. Some of the narrative tension comes from that distance between what the readers know and what the characters know.
‐‐ Kim Edwards

The secret ballot makes a secret government; and a secret government is a secret band of robbers and murderers.
‐‐ Lysander Spooner

The Secret Doctrine is the common property of the countless millions of men born under various climates, in times with which History refuses to deal, and to which esoteric teachings assign dates incompatible with the theories of Geology and Anthropology.
‐‐ Helena Blavatsky

'The Secret Garden' was the first musical that I fell in love with when I was a kid. My mom took me to see it, and it was the first one that I owned the soundtrack to and listened to over and over again.
‐‐ Allison Tolman

The secret I've lived by ever since I started earning money is this: Always buy a house with an extra bedroom adjoining the master. And that's always my closet.
‐‐ Polly Bergen

The Secret Intelligence Service I knew occupied dusky suites of little rooms opposite St James's Park Tube station in London.
‐‐ John le Carre

The secret is I have no shame.
‐‐ Dakota Johnson

The secret is keeping busy, and loving what you do.
‐‐ Lionel Hampton

The secret is not to act, but to be.
‐‐ Steven Seagal

The secret is not to care what anyone thinks of you.
‐‐ Julie Burchill

The secret is not to give up hope. It's very hard not to because if you're really doing something worthwhile I think you will be pushed to the brink of hopelessness before you come through the other side.
‐‐ George Lucas

The secret is not to make a film that causes something like Virginia Tech to happen. The secret is to make a film that stops it happening.
‐‐ Abel Ferrara

The secret is that I am Italian.
‐‐ Dennis Christopher

The secret is to be awake. To be awake is everything.
‐‐ Gustave Meyrink

The secret is to cook the aubergines the day before and let them dry of all the oil they drank in cooking. When you cook aubergine, they eat a lot of oil. It can be very heavy.
‐‐ Nana Mouskouri

The secret is to work less as individuals and more as a team. As a coach, I play not my eleven best, but my best eleven.
‐‐ Knute Rockne

The secret is to write just anything, to dare to write just anything, because when you write just anything, you begin to say what is important.
‐‐ Julien Green

'The Secret Life of Bees' was my first novel, so I had no process. I was flying by the seat of my pants, as they say, trying to understand how I, as a novelist, would work with story.
‐‐ Sue Monk Kidd

The secret lives of politicians are always shady. People need to accept the fact that their leaders aren't perfect. No one is.
‐‐ Evan Rachel Wood

The secret of a good life is to have the right loyalties and hold them in the right scale of values.
‐‐ Norman Thomas

The secret of a good marriage is forgiving your partner for marrying you in the first place.
‐‐ Sacha Guitry

The secret of a good sermon is to have a good beginning and a good ending, then having the two as close together as possible.
‐‐ George Burns

The secret of a happy marriage is finding the right person. You know they're right if you love to be with them all the time.
‐‐ Julia Child

The secret of a happy marriage remains a secret.
‐‐ Henny Youngman

The secret of a leader lies in the tests he has faced over the whole course of his life and the habit of action he develops in meeting those tests.
‐‐ Gail Sheehy

The secret of a long life is to never trust a doctor.
‐‐ Luise Rainer

The secret of a person's nature lies in their religion and what they really believes about the world and their place in it.
‐‐ James Anthony Froude

The secret of a successful newspaper is to take one story each day and bang the hell out of it. Give the public what it wants to have and part of what it ought to have whether it wants it or not.
‐‐ Herbert Bayard Swope

The secret of all effective advertising is not the creation of new and tricky words and pictures, but one of putting familiar words and pictures into new relationships.
‐‐ Leo Burnett

The secret of all effective originality in advertising is not the creation of new and tricky words and pictures, but one of putting familiar words and pictures into new relationships.
‐‐ Leo Burnett

The secret of all victory lies in the organization of the non-obvious.
‐‐ Oswald Spengler

The secret of any kind of reporting is to go with a guide. So if you, you're going to see Hezbollah in Beirut, you go with someone who knows the local people, and you'll be fine.
‐‐ David Ignatius

The secret of being a bore... is to tell everything.
‐‐ Voltaire

The secret of being a great actor is a love of food.
‐‐ Yash Chopra

The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation.
‐‐ George Bernard Shaw

The secret of big and revolutionary actions also consists in discovering the tiny step that is simultaneously a strategic step, insofar as it entails additional steps in the direction of a better reality.
‐‐ Gustav Heinemann

The secret of business is to know something that nobody else knows.
‐‐ Aristotle Onassis

The secret of concentration is the secret of self-discovery. You reach inside yourself to discover your personal resources, and what it takes to match them to the challenge.
‐‐ Arnold Palmer

The secret of doing well on TV is to understand that it's not too important. A lot of people watching doesn't change anything.
‐‐ Jack Germond

The secret of food lies in memory - of thinking and then knowing what the taste of cinnamon or steak is.
‐‐ Jerry Saltz

The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.
‐‐ Maximilien Robespierre

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.
‐‐ Aldous Huxley

The secret of getting ahead is getting started.
‐‐ Mark Twain

The secret of getting things done is to act!
‐‐ Dante Alighieri

The secret of golf is to turn three shots into two.
‐‐ Bobby Jones

The secret of good architecture is having more than meets the eye.
‐‐ Annabelle Selldorf

The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way.
‐‐ Richard Harding Davis

The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.
‐‐ Daniel Dennett