Quotes About Anecdotes

Because the cultures of politics and journalism are largely innocent of the scientific mindset, questions with massive consequences for life and death are answered by methods that we know lead to error, such as anecdotes, headlines, rhetoric, and what engineers call HiPPO (highest-paid person's opinion).

But bad luck makes good stories.

But we love the Old Travelers. We love to hear them prate and drivel and lie.

But I know eventually he will be filed under "H" for "hooker" in my expanding file cabinet of funny stories to be pulled out whenever I need a cheap laugh.

Conversation consists of developing and playing with ideas by juxtaposing the accumulated conclusions of two or more people and then improvising on them. It requires supplying such ingredients as information, experience, anecdotes, and opinions, but then being prepared to have them challenged and to contribute to a new mixture. Conversation

except that Sir Lionel tended to forget the middle bits of the stories, and his "mots" weren't terribly "bon.

When men sit around and talk, they are very competitive. One person will tell an anecdote and the next person will try to top that. When you get six women together, they share a lot more. They will be far more interested in what the other person has to say. The conservation is more interactive and less about individually showing off.

He based these anecdotes largely on stories he'd read in unverified accounts in small-town newspapers and crackpot magazines. It didn't matter that most of the facts and figures didn't check out. They stuck where it mattered: in the craw of hardworking taxpayers who felt cheated by so-called government entitlements. John Sears grew concerned that these yarns of Reagan's might come back to haunt him.

One of our worst traits in journalism is that when we have a narrative in our minds, we often plug in anecdotes that confirm it. Thus we managed to portray President Gerald Ford, a first-rate athlete, as a klutz.

Anecdotes are sometimes the best vehicles of truth, and if striking and appropriate are often more impressive and powerful than argument.

The first thing Gutenberg sought to publish, after the Bible, was a laxative timetable he called a "Purgation-Calendar." Then there is the astonishing number of anal German folk sayings. "As the fish lives in water, so does the shit stick to the asshole!," to select but one of the seemingly endless examples.

I'll find myself having dinner with people and someone will mention something and I will say I was in that situation once. Then I'll say, forget it, it was a scene I was in. That can get to be quite confusing.

I love history because when you strip away the social and political aspects, it's really just a bunch of fun stories.

She had no images of this love. She could offer no anecdotes. It was a belief rather than a memory.

Australians are very unfair in this way. They spend half of any conversation insisting that the country's dangers are vastly overrated and that there's nothing to worry about, and the other half telling you how six months ago their Uncle Bob was driving to Mudgee when a tiger snake slid out from under the dashboard and bit him on the groin, but that it's okay now because he's off the life support machine and they've discovered he can communicate with eye blinks.

In chatting to directors over the years, including James Wan, they always tell you the war stories. No one ever says, 'Oh, I had a great time on that film.' It's always this went wrong, that went wrong.

Because many of us have been in game shows for some time, there's always someone around who can share a story of Johnny O or Jay Stewart that I never heard.

I don't like long jokes. I like stories rather than setup punchlines.

He had a little story for every situation, Ghompal. I relished them hugely; they were like simple, homeopathic remedies, little pellets of truth garbed in some innocuous cloak. You could never forget them afterwards, that was what I liked about these yarns. We write fat books to expound a simple idea; the Oriental tells a simple, pointed story which lodges in your brain like a diamond

Every life moves far too swiftly. A few anecdotes, one or two passages of laughter, a midnight flight of sorrow, and then the end.

Having kids has proven to be this amazing - for me, this amazing source of ideas of anecdotes, of examples, I can test my own kids without human subject permission, so they pilot - I pilot my ideas on them. And so it is a tremendous advantage to have kids if you're going to be a developmental psychologist.

It's usually a jolly good trick to pick up a local tour guide. They can tell you all the anecdotes that make a place interesting. I'm one for rushing off to museums at the crack of dawn, eating fabulous things on terraces for lunch, and enjoying long dinners on balmy evenings.

In a faraway land called 'pre-2000,' what Earthlings now call blogging was called 'keeping a diary.' It's hard work to do well. I tried doing it in the early 1990s but had to stop because I no longer had a life - instead I had this thing that generated anecdotes to go into my diary. The diary took over and I had to stop.

What is the point of bad dates if not to have amusing anecdotes for your friends?