When I moved to Los Angeles, aged 54, I printed out Winston Churchill’s phrase, ‘Never, never, never give up’, and stuck it on my fridge. I had no idea what was going to happen, but I knew I had to keep on going.
I might have created the phrase ‘memory tools’, but people have always found talismans to help them meditate into a state of hypnosis where they can access their past lives.
When ‘Deadwood’ came along, it was totally like Shakespeare. The long speeches were like soliloquies. If one phrase of a monologue was out of whack, the entire one-page speech didn’t work.
Throughout my political career, I’ve believed in the concept of home rule. Some call it local control. Whichever phrase you use, the concept is the same – the best decisions are those made closest to those who will be impacted by the decisions.
It’s not that Millennials don’t believe some things are serious. We’ll make ‘It Gets Better’ videos or perform comedy for disaster relief. But sum up our lives in a phrase? The Importance of Never Being Too Earnest.
‘Form follows function’ comes with so much baggage. It’s a worthless phrase because you’ll never take it for what it means.
If I hear an interesting turn of phrase on TV, I’ll repeat it back – I just like to roll it around on my tongue. The same goes for dialog: I’ll either speak it aloud or whisper it. I definitely sit in front of my computer and mutter. People have mentioned it.
‘America has no culture!’ is a phrase that we’ve all heard many times in our lives. As is often the case, a lie repeated often enough becomes an assumed truth (kind of like the tall tale of Janeane Garofalo being a comedian).
I think I’m writing for an intelligent stranger – you know, in my mind I can’t remember who coined that phrase first. I don’t want to write anything that makes me cringe, first of all. I cringe a lot – mostly when I hear popular music.
Have you ever thought how one phrase, one sentence, one troll can ruin someone’s entire life? Why do we interfere in their private lives? Think of others as our properties? And say whatever bitterness is in our hearts without thinking twice?
I don’t really think about the fact that a lot of people are watching ‘DSDS’ or about the way I should phrase my sentences.
I definitely stand by the phrase that I’m an entertainer and not a role model.
I wish I had coined the phrase ‘tyranny of choice,’ but someone beat me to it. The counterintuitive truth is that have an abundance of options does not make you feel privileged and indulged; too many options make you feel like all of them are wrong, and that you are wrong if you choose any of them.
Why is playing football in Europe considered the pinnacle of our game, yet in other spheres of life, that same phrase – ‘being in Europe’ – is dismissed with suspicion?
The phrase ‘working mum’ makes me nervous.
‘Globalization’ has become the great tag phrase, but when we talk about it, it’s nearly always in terms of the global marketplace or communications technology – either data or goods that are whizzing around. We forget that people are whizzing around more and more. On them, it takes a toll.
Growing up, I was discouraged from telling personal stories. My dad often used the phrase ‘Don’t tell anyone.’ But not about creepy things. I don’t want to lead you down the wrong path. It would be about insignificant things. Like, I wouldn’t make the soccer team, and my father would say, ‘Don’t tell anyone.’
The noun phrase straw man, now used as a compound adjective as in ‘straw-man device, technique or issue,’ was popularized in American culture by ‘The Wizard of Oz.’
I’ve usually used the phrase ‘stay the course’ as one of the great rules of investment success.
I once hosted the Butcher Shop of the Year Awards. There’s nothing like performing to the personification of the phrase a ‘sausage fest’ to hammer home how you’ve hit the big time.
Among intellectuals who consider themselves ‘scientific,’ the phrase ‘the nature of man’ is apt to have the effect of a red flag on a bull.
I have a phrase I say: ‘What the damn?’ It’s my favorite. It just came to me one day.
When the vast baby-boom generation exploded into adolescence in the 1960s, marketers exulted. Advertising consultants, always eager to coin a phrase, began happily explaining to corporations the difference between ‘teenyboppers’ and ‘counterculture consumers.’
When I used to teach civil procedure as a law professor, I would begin the year by telling my students that ‘civil procedure is the etiquette of ritualized battle.’ The phrase, which did not originate with me, captured the point that peaceful, developed societies resolve disputes by law rather than by force.
For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase; it is quite literally true.
There is a phrase in French, which means ‘to miss.’ To pass by. To not be able to stop. You love someone and someone loves you, but it just can’t work for different reasons.
The phrase ‘change the world’ is tossed around Silicon Valley conversations and business plans as freely as talk of ‘early-stage investing’ and ‘beta tests.’
I don’t have any contempt for the men who have to have jobs and have to commute and have to pay the mortgage and have to get their kids an education. To me, that’s the backbone of America, to coin a phrase.
The one phrase you can use is that success has a thousand fathers, and failure is an orphan.
‘Islamist terrorism.’ The very phrase is contentious. No one wants to make this problem harder by unfairly branding and alienating a quarter of the world’s population, and even in this construction, no one should be thinking this means all of Islam or all Muslims.
I’ve always sung. My dad had a song in his heart and on his lips 24/7. A lot of the time, it was the same song and the same phrase over and over again.
Warren Buffett is famous for talking about the ‘intrinsic value’ of stocks. But while many people parrot this phrase, few know what it really means.
I worked at a jewelry store to pay the bills when I first moved to N.Y.C., and I always loved the phrase ‘Semi Precious.’ So I wanted to just call the band Semi Precious, but my dad told it was kinda sissy, so I added Weapons.
The catch phrase for the day is ‘Do an act of kindness. Help one person smile.’
I’ve been on TV a long time, and I’ve never had a catch phrase.
The really explicit phrase is doors of perception.
You’ve heard the phrase ‘There are no small roles, just small actors?’ Well, I kind of disagree. There are small roles, but when you get a lot of them in a row, you can become a pretty successful actress, and that’s what I’ve done.
There will never be another ‘Let’s get ready to rumble,’ so I see it as my duty to protect the phrase as I would a rare gem.
Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.
When I’m writing, I generally toy with an idea until it manifests itself – meaning a phrase or a tune comes into my head and eventually begins to jell. When something hits me, I write it down immediately. I don’t wait, or it’s gone.
Why e-mail a full emotional statement when, instead, you can text a totally insignificant and ambiguous half-considered phrase?
You can’t write an image, a metaphor, a story, a phrase, without leaning a little further into the shared world, without recognizing that your supposed solitude is at every point of its perimeter touching some other.
Micro humor is a joke that’s contained in the writing: it’s a punch line, it’s a turn of phrase, it’s something that you can see on the page, and no matter who’s saying it, it is, in and of itself, a funny line.
On a professional side, you’ve got a tough problem to fix, Geoff Miller’s going to do it, and he’s always going to do it to very high standards, and he’s always going to be on the side of right. He’s always talking about ‘what right looks like’ – just a phrase he would always use.
I don’t do nostalgia. The phrase ‘the good old days’ never passes my lips.
Now the writing in the head, I definitely do every day, thinking about how I want to phrase something or how I’d like to rephrase something I’ve already written.
The phrase ‘work/life balance’ encapsulates a depressing outlook.
I think I invented the phrase ‘Don’t overdo it.’
Poor but happy is not a phrase invented by a poor person.
My father was a tomato farmer. There is the phrase that says he or she worked their fingers to the bone, well, that’s my dad. And he was a very good man.
I tried for about a year to write a teenage character until I finally got the phrase ‘he has lost the power of rational thought and the use of his arms.’ Everything else came from that.
It’s very hard to imagine the phrase ‘consumer society’ used so cheerfully, and interpreted so enthusiastically, in England.
To illustrate what I mean, an apt dancer may be in thorough unison with the others in that particular group, and at the same time reveal a difference in dancing temperament, rhythm or technique; she may phrase, accentuate or actually interpret differently.
If there is a God, the phrase that must disgust him is – holy war.
I never felt like I had anything really figured out. When I was a teenager, it was all about teenagers having an ‘identity crisis.’ That was the phrase that was used. But in my early 20s, I was still like, ‘When am I going to be over that?’
