Whittle Quotes

“You shouldn't speak until you know what you're talking about. That's why I get uncomfortable with interviews. Reporters ask me what I feel China should do about Tibet. Who cares what I think China should do? I'm a fucking actor! They hand me a script. I act. I'm here for entertainment. Basically, when you whittle everything away, I'm a grown man who puts on makeup.”

— Brad Pitt

“The man who trims himself to suit everybody will soon whittle himself away”

— Charles Schwab

“There's a reason why I tell this story. To me these Sunday painters represent myo-the strangeness of beauty-an idea that transcendence can be found in what's common and small. Rather than wishing for singularity and celebrity and genius (and growing all gloomy in its absence), these painters recognize the ordinariness of their talents and remain undaunted.
It's the blessings in life, not in self, that they mean to express.
And therein lies the transcendence. For as people pursue their plain, decent goals, as they whittle their crude flutes, paint their flat landscapes, make unexceptional love to their spouses-in their numbers across cultures and time, in their sheer tenacity as in the face of a random universe they perform their small acts of awareness and appreciation-there is a mysterious, strange beauty.”

— Lydia Minatoya

“Not that I was morbidly obese or anything. But I guess I was hanging on the hope that one day I might accidentally whittle down to my inner toothpick.”

— Adele Griffin

“Indeed, as Peter Whittle recounts, during World War II efforts to solve the question so sapped the energies and minds of Allied analysts  ... that the suggestion was made that the problem be dropped over Germany, as the ultimate instrument of intellectual sabotage.”

— Brian Christian

“Once, I started listing off all the people that I truly cared about. When I got to number seven, Penelope told me I either needed to whittle down my list or stop making friends immediately. My mother says you should never have more people in your life than you could defend from a hungry rakshasa.”

— Rainbow Rowell

“I can change, whittle my square edges to fit in a round hole. God, I hope I'm never going to massacre myself that way.”

— Sylvia Plath

“Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing things historians usually record; while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks of the river.”

— Will Durant

“Stop and think about it: even just leveling the playing field with China for a decade would be the equivalent of one-fifth of our national debt (and would have been one-third of our debt had we not elected the community organizer). You add in several hundred billion a year from putting OPEC in line, hundreds of billions from negotiating properly with the many other countries that are ripping us off, root out the hundreds of billions of incredible fraud that occur every year (more on that later), and now we have a debt problem America can manage-one where we can attack waste and abuse and whittle down the remaining debt to get our fiscal house in order. So that's the first step: bringing home the hundreds of billions of dollars that the petro thugs at OPEC and our enemy China steal from us every single year-and then go after all of the others.”

— Donald J. Trump

“I like a man who can build things. Whittle me something out of wood and I'm sold.”

— Rachel Bilson

“He who trims himself to suit everyone will soon whittle himself away.”

— Raymond Hull

“Jupiter is so big and its gravitational pull so strong that man would find it difficult to move about on the surface. The answer is to whittle it down to proper size with terrajets and nuclear power, using the debris to increase the size of Jupiter's moons so they, too, can be colonized.”

— Fritz Zwicky

“Because the truth is, the world will probably whittle your daughter down. But a mother never should.”

— Meg Wolitzer

“Gentlemen, I give you the Whittle engine.”

— Frank Whittle

“Here. Let me untangle your hair, at least. If we need to run, we can't have you stuck."
"I don't think Bob's up for running," I said.
"Then you'll take my horse."
"What about you?"
"I'll stay here and whittle a sword and kill the bear or, if that doesn't work, I'll just be eaten alive, happily sacrificing my life for yours." He gave me a look. "Or I'll just stay on the horse and you can sit behind me. Satan can hold two, I'm sure."
"Oh, so you're a cowboy now? I wasn't aware that architects were also masters of horseflesh. You and Satan BFFs now? Practiced your stunt-riding this morning?"
"My dad gave me a few lessons."
"When? When you were six?"
"Well, you know, Harper, maybe we should just stay here and bicker until the bear can't stand it anymore and kills us both. Would that make you happy?”

— Kristan Higgins

“A great deal of my battle, as an actor, is to whittle away the things that make me self-conscious and try to trick myself into not being self-conscious. So, it's always a challenge, whether I'm lying in a hospital bed or flying around with a rocket pack on my back, or what have you. On the best of days, it's a challenge for me.”

— Billy Campbell

“I think part of the problem sometimes is that there's so much happening in my books, to whittle it down into a single script is hard.”

— Sarah Dessen

“I have like 250 letters that I have to whittle it down to 150. Only then do you have the whole overview of a book. When it was finally edited, at least my take was, everybody's lying. You know?”

— Don Novello

“Though it is the hardest thing, to work out one's weight and heft in the world, to whittle down all that I am and give it a value.”

— Anna Funder

“Yes, I have been forced to whittle down the facts, and to be a liar, but it is not one universe, there are millions, almost as many as the number of human eyes and brains in existence, that awake every morning.”

— Marcel Proust

“Most moms and dads, they want to be good moms and dads. But it's an incredibly hard job when you are stressed out, when you are poor, when your life is in chaos. And giving them some of the tools to be better parents, to whittle away at that parenting gap, gives those kids a much better starting point in life.”

— Nicholas Kristof

“He no longer heard Kellhus speak so much as observed him cut and carve, whittle and hew, as though the man had somehow shattered the glass of language and fashioned knives from the pieces.”

— R. Scott Bakker

“There are dons who care for the intellect and the imagination, and there are priests who care for the spirit; but broadly speaking the function of universities and churches alike is to trim and tame enthusiasm, to suppress curiosity, and, in short, to whittle immortal souls into serviceable props of the established order.”

— Hugh Kingsmill

“Whittle was an amazing chap. Tiny, stubborn, unstoppable - jet-propelled! It's amazing the impact his invention has had upon the world.”

— Adam Hart-Davis

“I believe that almost all important, useful ideas are simple. Peter Whittle has recently put it nicely in an autobiographical essay. "If a piece of work is heavy and complicated then it is wrong." ... Some writers feel that to express their ideas in simple terms is degrading. Some use complexity to disguise the paucity of their material. In fact, simplicity is a virtue and when, as here, it is both original and useful, it can represent a real advance in knowledge.”

— Dennis Lindley

“But if you eat this chap who's God,' said Llewelyn stoutly, 'how can it be horrible? If it's alright to eat God why is it horrible to eat Jim Whittle?'
'Because,' said Dymphna reasonably, ' if you eat God there's always plenty left. You can't eat God up because God just goes on and on and on and God can't ever be finished ...”

— Anthony Burgess

“Some actors count their lines as soon as they receive a script. I'm the opposite. I try to see how many lines I can whittle down. You can say just as much in 4 as you can in 14.”

— Glenn Ford

“A language like Ruby is a toolbox with some really neat little tools that do their job really nicely. JavaScript is a leather sheath with a really really sharp knife inside. That knife can cut anything, and with it you can do anything. You can kill a bear. You can catch fish. You can whittle a piece of wood into a pony. It's even a toothpick.”

— Nick Morgan

“I think that the older you get, the more you become your true, essential self. You find the things that make you happy. You whittle away the parts of yourself that mean less to you.”

— Tom Ford

“We have learned to whittle the Eden Tree to the shape of a surplice peg, We have learned to bottle our parents twain in the yelk of an addled egg. We know that the tail must wag the dog, for the horse is drawn by the cart, But the devil whoops, as he whooped of old; It's clever, but is it art?”

— Rudyard Kipling

“The novelist's
any writer's
object is to whittle down his meaning to the exactest and finest possible point. What, of course, isfatal is when he does not know what he does mean: he has no point to sharpen.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

“I really did feel like I was surrounded by family members. I didn't have a dad, and I remember there were all these guys - in the old days, there were no women, except a makeup artist or, occasionally, a script supervisor. So there were just guys who taught me how to, you know, whittle wood, or how to pull focus, and what the camera was doing. And if I was being bratty, they'd sit me down and tell me. There were lots of rules about not being late and making sure that you didn't spill anything. So it felt a little bit like I was in a family.”

— Jodie Foster

“I might write four lines or I might write twenty. I subtract and I add until I really hit something I want to do. You don't always whittle down, sometimes you whittle up.”

— Grace Paley

“No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious.”

— H.L. Mencken