Quotes About Legacy

Every person has a legacy. You may not know what your impact is, and it may not be something that you can write on your tombstone, but every person has an impact on this world.

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them. During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: 'I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.'

It is hard for anyone who discovers George Washington not to write about him, perhaps because he is so hard to discover and such a surprise when you do.

I'm touched by the Beatles. I want some of the music I do to reflect that. Here I am. I love Sly Stone and James Brown and Stevie Wonder, and I want my music to reflect some of that. Here I am. I'm touched by Jon Hendricks. I want some of my music to reflect that. And when I write, you're going to hear it.

I've had a wonderful life. What people are going to write about me 10 years after I'm dead - who cares?

I think Liverpool have a long history with many great players. I hope one day to be up there with those great players. I'll try my best to write some history here.

I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.

When I'm 40 and nobody wants to see me in a sparkly dress anymore, I'll be like: 'Cool, I'll just go in the studio and write songs for kids.'

If you're thinking the road ahead is a little shorter than the one behind you, you're thinking about trying to write a good song and hoping to make a decent record of it.

I doubt I'll be singing forever, because at some point people aren't going to want to hear my music, and I hope that I'll still get the opportunity to write songs.

But while the British empire is easy to write about, it is very difficult to summarise. This is because what we call 'empire' spans 400 years in time and thousands of miles in space; every continent on Earth was directly affected by it.

I was carrying my friend in his casket to put him in the hearse, and I was thinking, 'I need to write a song for this guy, because he always told me I would have a No. 1 song.'

I considered that I had to write stories about the people I had met, with whom I'd worked, the history of my books - just in case I up and die.

After 'Lindbergh,' my publisher asked whom I wanted to write about next. I said, 'There's one idea I've been carrying in my hip pocket for 35 years. It's Woodrow Wilson.'

The last thing in the world I want to do is write something in memory of Walter Mischel. I still can't quite accept that he's gone. And so I procrastinate, and with every day I don't put pen to paper, I reinforce his life's work with my reluctance.

On my tombstone just write, 'The sorest loser that ever lived.'

I'll write three operas - one for Verdi, one for Puccini, and one for Bellini.

I get to sing and act and write and create and produce for a living and share art with people, and I feel like a piece of that is in honor of those who came before me.

I am hoping that I can be known as a great writer and actor some day, rather than a sex symbol.

Hemingway was a jerk. I mean he was really a great jerk. He was a good writer, and he did all sorts of things that I would never have the courage to do, but I don't think I'd enjoy being in the same room with him. He's not my kind of person.

Unfortunately for my family, they have a writer in the family.

A writer wants something more than money for his work: he wants permanence.

Ernest Hemingway did a great deal toward making the writer an acceptable public figure; obviously, he was no sissy.

But whatever my failure, I have this thing to remember - that I was a pioneer in my profession, just as my grandfathers were in theirs, in that I was the first man in this section to earn his living as a writer.