140 Characters Quotes

The world cannot live on 140 characters alone. ~ Matt Mullenweg

I write the occasional entry for the 'Times' Theatre blog, especially when I'm in London and seeing two shows a day, but I don't tweet. I don't want to have to express my opinion in 140 characters. That's like writing haiku. You need a certain amount of legroom to review a play properly. ~ Ben Brantley

As for tweeting and texting: impassioned discussions, particularly when they're intimate, don't work in abbreviated script messages. No relationship should begin or end in 140 characters. ~ Mariella Frostrup

Isabel's infamous tweets ranged from the cartoonish and impossible:
Im going to pull ur tongue out of ur mouth wrap it around ur neck n strangle u w it so hard ur eyes will pop out. i will pee in the sockets.
To the quaint:
Get ur fcking hands off him bitch i will cut u. #RupertLIsMine
To the cryptically disturbing:
I watch u in your sleep.
I would never condone Isabel's scary tweets, but you had to give the girl credit for managing to stay under 140 characters every time. ~ Goldy Moldavsky

Writers are b*tc*ing about 140 characters. If you can't make a point in two sentences, how good is that book of yours really going to be?
Taken from Twitter Titters Volume 1 edited by John Rice ~ A.W. Tozer

Thiel rejects the small-mindedness of most of the Valley's entrepreneurialism. The motto of Founders Fund is: "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters." But ~ Richard Byrne Reilly

So if u shorten words to get what u want in within 140 characters it makes u a twit? ~ Rio Ferdinand

And let me make the radical statement that I don't believe that you can say something profound in the 140 characters that make up a tweet. ~ Bernie Sanders

I'm a child of the literary bent. I don't want to see 140 characters. I want to see a story. ~ Joanne Kelly

The whole Twitter phenomenon is really indicative of what's happening in this country. And I say this in condemnation of myself as much as anyone else - we are growing into a nation that has no time, desire or capacity for truth. All we can handle is 140 characters of knowledge. ~ Kurt Sutter

I'm sure there are some commercial applications for Twitter, but they don't really interest me. I mean, 140 characters? I am really not interested in Ashton Kutcher's daily walks. Not for me. ~ Barry Diller

Most of my novels were developped from dreams I had. A dreamer I AM! Literally , at 1 AM. A dream with 140 characters is to dream an impossible dream. Too many characters to develoo from it. But in twitter that worked just fine for me, ~ Ana Claudia Antunes

We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters. ~ Peter Thiel

A photo app is a utility. It's like comparing 'Twitter' to Microsoft Word. If you want to be an author, you're not always going to constrain yourself to 140 characters. ~ Kevin Systrom

Twitter is my happy place. I am not there to overthink 140 characters. ~ Roxane Gay

For me, Twitter is a public persona. It's UbuWeb or Kenneth Goldsmith (as opposed to Kenny Goldsmith). I don't interact. It's a lousy form for conversation and opinion (what can you really say in 140 characters?), but a wonderful propaganda and sloganeering tool. I use it as a one-way street. ~ Kenneth Goldsmith

Language is always evolving. It's difficult to read Shakespeare now because language has shifted. Similarly, kids these days can get to the point really quick in about 140 characters or less because of these new tools. ~ Erik Qualman

There are risks in the sheer brevity of Twitter, and it's actually quite an elegant art reducing what you have to say to 140 characters, and it's something that I quite enjoy attempting to do. ~ Richard Dawkins

Today almost everybody is a writer, the enormous publish button on blogs and websites begs you everywhere to click on it! And bam you are a writer. To hell with agents and publishing houses and rejection letters. Immortality for you is on the click of a mouth! We are advancing at the speed of light! You can become an author at 140 characters. To hell with long winding sentences and long hours of scratching the head, the immortals of today instantly get a "like" and they instantly enter the pantheon! They seat side by side Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, St Paul, Buddha, Martin Luther, Rousseau, Bangambiki… ~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

Facebook and Twitter and these other social sites bring every, I mean, 140 characters. I mean, I'm on Twitter and I have fun. But I don't think anybody learns anything about me as a person. ~ Sherman Alexie

You may actually be the only person who gets more than 140 characters from me. That's kind of awesome, right? ~ Becky Albertalli

So why is Chinese social networking booming despite the censorship? Part of the reason is the Chinese language. Posts on Twitter and Twitter clones such as Weibo are limited to 140 characters. In English that comes to about 20 words or a sentence with a short link - in effect, a headline. But in Chinese you can write a whole paragraph or tell a whole story in 140 characters. One Chinese tweet is equal to 3.5 English tweets. In some ways, Weibo (which means "microblog" in Chinese) is more like Facebook than Twitter. As far as the Chinese are concerned, if something is not on Weibo, it does not exist. ~ Michael Anti

Oh, I'm following President Obama on Twitter. I like my black history in 140 characters or less. ~ Baratunde R. Thurston

The man glanced up. "Hello. Tweeter tells me you're Kody, a fellow Mundanian, newly arrived, and you want to compare notes." "Uh, yes, in essence," Kody agreed, taken aback. All that from one tweet? Well, maybe it did fit within 140 characters. ~ Piers Anthony

Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings. Following complex story lines stretches our brains beyond the 140 characters of sound-bite thinking, and staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps. ~ Ann Patchett

Twitter is very impulsive and impermanent and you only have 140 characters. There is no greater 'Emperor' of Twitter than Stephen Fry. ~ David Tang

It only takes 140 characters to toss one's character out the window. ~ LZ Granderson

I feel like Twitter was tailor-made for me, because I can do short spurts all day long. I loved my blog, but doing daily, then thrice weekly entries was really time consuming. 140 characters is perfect. ~ Sarah Dessen

Truth is, we all project a false front to the world, peppering our social media pages with witty words and silly emoticons. Life narrowed down to 140 characters, staged selfies, and tirades over opinion posts. Life lived for the approval of the masses, all while tearing strangers down for the slightest misstep. ~ Kristen Callihan

I'm not gay," said Raphael. "I'm not straight. I'm not interested." "Your sexuality is 'not interested'?" Alec asked curiously. Raphael said, "That's right. ~ Cassandra Clare

I have a color-coded computer spreadsheet that divides things down to chapter fragments. Each character's point-of-view is a different color. The text of the manuscript is color-coded the same way. The last thing I do before submitting the manuscript is turn all those colors back to black. ~ Neal Shusterman

That's the beauty of the acting world. You can play so many different characters who know and do so many things that you have no idea about as yourself. So I'm a big fan of workshops and classes and learning new things because you can always apply it. It's your little supply bag of creativity. Keep filling it up. ~ Daniela Ruah

I guess the characters I play may be at the more destructive edge of the spectrum, more damaged or whatever, but I find a lot of female roles uninteresting. ~ Lili Taylor

It's kind of my whole philosophy as an actor. I think that's what we're supposed to do is play a wide range of characters - or it's just what I like to do, I should say. I like to try to be as different as I can from one thing to the next. ~ Garret Dillahunt

I think journalists and filmmakers are keen observers. And actors must also be sharp observers as they draw their characters and their stories from what they experience around them. After all, that is what actors, filmmakers, journalists are trained to be: observers. And then they do something with their observations. ~ Pat Mitchell

The best shows are always the ones that are very, very low-concept and just about great characters. ~ Michael Schur

We all learn, whether consciously or not, that the default interpretation of behavior reflects a character's state of mind, and every fictional story that we read reinforces our tendency to make that kind of interpretation first. ~ Lisa Zunshine

So we all know the cliché characters: the Irish cop, the prostitute with a heart of gold, the writer with a drinking problem, and so forth. Clichés often exist for a reason, of course, and sometimes it's okay to use a tried and true character. But not always. Populate your stories with only stock characters and there won't be any reason to read your tales over anyone else's. ~ Craig Hart

Conversations with a trusted friend pull us into a new point of view as if we are supporting characters in a work of fiction. In both, we spread our stories, ideas and emotions outside of ourselves so we can view them from distinct angles. ~ Teresa Hirst

A story happens when two equally appealing forces, or characters, or ideas try to occupy the same place at the same time, and they're both right. ~ Amy Hempel

As a matter of writing philosophy, if there is one, I try not to ever plot a story. I try to write it from the character's point of view and see where it goes. ~ Andre Dubus III

I would point out that I'm an actress for a reason! If I were popular in high school, I would have considered another career because I wouldn't have been alone in my room, making up other characters for myself. I definitely had growing pains. The popular kids didn't want anything to do with the girl who was starting the drama club. ~ Ginnifer Goodwin

Being an author means, almost by definition, that you make up characters and then complicate their lives. That's it, really. You make up characters and give them problem after problem after problem. ~ Maureen Johnson

Through style, the creative effort reconstructs the world, and always with the same slight
distortion that is the mark of both art and protest. Whether it is the enlargement of the microscope which
Proust brings to bear on human experience or, on the contrary, the absurd insignificance with which the
American novel endows its characters, reality is in some way artificial. The creative force, the fecundity
of rebellion, are contained in this distortion which the style and tone of a work represent. Art is an
impossible demand given expression and form. When the most agonizing protest finds its most resolute
form of expression, rebellion satisfies its real aspirations and derives creative energy from this fidelity to
itself. Despite the fact that this runs counter to the prejudices of the times, the greatest style in art is the
expression of the most passionate rebellion. Just as genuine classicism is only romanticism subdued,
genius is a rebellion that has created its own limits. That is why there is no genius, contrary to what we
are taught today, in negation and pure despair. ~ Albert Camus

The reader can't take much for granted in a fiction where the scenery can eat the characters. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

'Pretty Deadly' is the story of these immortal and mortal characters, and the mortals' story follows Sarah's family, a black family, through the ages. I never made the choice of, 'Oh, this is gonna be the story of an African American family!' ~ Kelly Sue DeConnick

The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story. ~ Donna Tartt

I think you're always afraid when you go into like a big superhero movie that it's gonna be kinda just action and you're not gonna be able to just really go to the bottom of the characters. ~ Joel Kinnaman

Having read the source material, I had to have drawn from that. As a fan, I wanted to remain true to that character, but it was really cool because, as we were figuring these characters out, I realized that there was a lot more backstory, rather than what I had gotten just from reading the book. Glenn doesn't really get much of a backstory there. He's just seen as this kid who is put in this situation, not knowing where his mind-set is, but then you slowly see him start to develop. ~ Steven Yeun

Creating characters is easy. It's getting them to behave that's the problem. ~ Steven Ramirez

Some actors can create characters and leave them at 'Cut!', but I work the opposite way and drag them out of me. For me, it's about fixing your fabric to fit the role. ~ Sam Worthington

I asked Shia: who is the guy that terrifies you the most? And he said Mads. So it was somebody we both really wanted to work with. He's intimidating, but has a really big heart and he's sexy. He's got this sexiness, even guys fall for him. He just penetrates everything-not literally. So we needed a brokenhearted thug that could really give us the heartache. And going between the violence and viciousness and the complete softness without making it too much. A lot of those characters can go into a charade, and I needed it to be genuine heartbrokenness and that's what he's great at doing. ~ Fredrik Bond

I don't know about ground rules; but I create the world that arrives with the characters or situation or voice in my head that instigates the piece, whatever form it may take. ~ Norman Lock

She found the book tucked at the edge of a shelf in the room where she sleeps, and it is thick with pages and words and characters, and reading helps Jinhua to remember and it helps her to forget--and it has been such a long, long time since she has held a book in her hands. When she is not reading Jinhua is sad... ~ Alexandra Curry

I would say it was the directors. We have to give credit to the directors for this, because in the script, we just said, "Gru's Minions do this or do that" in the initial draft. And then, they came up with the characters' design and the philosophical concept of the Minions. And then, we started writing to that. We have to give a lot of credit to them. ~ Cinco Paul

If you can play lots of different characters, that's fun. As long as the material is good, that's what the attraction is for me. ~ Freddie Stroma

Once
God wrote a story
that shook the heaven to the very core.
Love was the only language used;
You and I
were the only characters. ~ Subhan Zein

Before you start production, you have characters you have created without actors in mind, then all of a sudden you've got actors. They bring an enormous amount in creating these characters, and creating the dynamics between the characters that you've written. ~ Charlie Kaufman

At the time, my 6-year-old kept thinking my character's name was "Sam Alone," which is kind of brilliant. The funny came out of Sam's sad core: the alcoholic, the sex addict, the person who thinks he's God's gift. ~ Ted Danson