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1 " The recipe for becoming a good novelist, for example is easy to give but to carry it out presupposes qualities one is accustomed to overlook when one says 'I do not have enough talent'. One has only to make a hundred or so sketches for novels, none longer than two pages but of such distinctness that every word in them is necessary; one should write down anecdotes each day until one has learned how to give them the most pregnant and effective form; one should be tireless in collecting and describing human types and characters; one should above all relate things to others and listen to others relate, keeping one's eyes and ears open for the effect produced on those present, one should travel like a landscape painter or costume designer; one should excerpt for oneself out of the individual sciences everything that will produce an artistic effect when it is well described, one should, finally, reflect on the motives of human actions, disdain no signpost to instruction about them and be a collector of these things by day and night. One should continue in this many-sided exercise some ten years: what is then created in the workshop, however, will be fit to go out into the world. - What, however, do most people do? They begin, not with the parts, but with the whole. Perhaps they chance to strike a right note, excite attention and from then on strike worse and worse notes, for good, natural reasons. "
― Friedrich Nietzsche , Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
2 " In marriage, each partner is to be an encourager rather than a critic; a forgiver rather than a collector of hurts; an enabler rather than a reformer. "
3 " I’m Temple Claybourne, an upright, warm-blooded hairy mammal, Caucasian, skidding into my fourth decade of existence, the progeny of meat-eating Anglo-Saxon tribal chieftains, left-handed, flat of foot, with low cholesterol and a predictably receding hairline, carrying a zero debt load, a nervous driver, nervous in crowds, nervous around women, hungry with curiosity, a collector of comforting, unnecessary things. "
4 " The artist is a collector of things imaginary or real. He accumulates things with the same enthusiasm that a little boy stuffs his pockets. The scrap heap and the museum are embraced with equal curiosity. He takes snapshots, makes notes and records impressions on tablecloths or newspapers, on backs of envelopes or matchbooks. Why one thing and not another is part of the mystery, but he is omnivorous. "
― Paul Rand , Paul Rand: A Designer's Art
5 " There is a certain seductiveness about what is dead. It will retain all those admirable qualities of life with none of that tiresome messiness associated with live things. Crap and complaints and the need for affection. You can auction it, museum it, collect it. It’s much safer to be a collector of curios, because if you are curious, you have to sit and sit and see what happens. You have to wait on the beach until it gets cold, and you have to invest in a glass-bottomed boat, which is more expensive than a fishing rod, and puts you in the path of the elements. The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home, like all the men who now live with mermaids at the bottom of the sea. "
― Jeanette Winterson , Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
6 " I'm more a collector of identities and words that feel right to me. To me this is an inarguable point. I am who I say I am and that's not up for debate. "
7 " ...someone ought to invent a tool, a kind of plane to shave the lies away from stories and deception away from memories. I'm a collector of shavings. "
― Saša Stanišić , How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone
8 " Bryce looked like a California underwear model. Not that I’d thought about him in his underwear.Much.He was talking with his friend Nathan. Where Bryce had the whole tan, blond, hazel-eyed thing going on, Nathan was fair with dark hair and dark eyes. They looked like opposite sides of the same coin. A really hot, totally unreachable coin that a collector would keep in a special locked case, which normal girls like myself were not allowed to touch. "
9 " I adore forgotten words, long lost folk tales, and books with pages soft and crumbling. I am a collector of scents and memories. The things that others bury are the things I hold most dear. "
― , Poetry for Melancholy Ghosts and Ethereal Maidens
10 " She was a collector of reflections looking for souls that could see deeply inside her soul. "
― Shannon L. Alder
11 " Sussman had the ability to seize facts and lock them in his memory, where they remained poised for instants recall. More than any other editor at the Post, or Bernstein and Woodward, Sussman became a walking compendium of Watergate knowledge, a reference source to be summoned when even the library failed. On a deadline, he would pump these facts into a story in a constant infusion, working up a body of significant information to support what otherwise seemed like the weakest of revelations. In Sussman's mind, everything fitted. Watergate was a puzzle and he was a collector of the pieces.-- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward "
― Carl Bernstein , All the President's Men
12 " As his dark closet shows, Bluebeard was a collector at heart, and even after dispatching a wife, could not let her fully depart. "
― , Tales of Bluebeard and His Wives from Late Antiquity to Postmodern Times
13 " I'm fascinated by the narrative of geology, and I'm a veritable pack rat of a collector on the road. I keep a rock hammer in my car. "
