Stamp of a Writer: Virginia Woolf

"Language is wine upon the lips."

"Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind."

"Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money."

"Books are the mirrors of the soul."

"I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual."

"Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others."

"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

"Do we write better? Do we read better? We read and wrote 400 years ago when we were un-lectured, un-criticized, un-taught."

"Words do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind. And how do they live in the mind? Variously and strangely, much as human beings live, ranging hither and dither falling in love, meeting together. It's true they are much less bound by ceremony, convention, than we are. Royal words meet with common words. English words marry French words, German words, Indian words..."

"Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction—so we are told."

Stamp of an Actor: James Dean

© USPS

"When an actor plays a scene exactly the way a director orders, it isn't acting. It's following instructions. Anyone with the physical qualifications can do that.""Being a good actor isn't easy. Being a man is even harder. I want to be both before I'm done."

"An actor must interpret life, and in order to do so must be willing to accept all the experiences life has to offer. In fact, he must seek out more of life than life puts at his feet."

"I think there is only one form of greatness for man. If a man can bridge the gap between life and death. I mean, if he can live on after he has died, then maybe he was a great man. To me the only success, the only greatness, is immortality."

"Trust and belief are two prime considerations. You must not allow yourself to be opinionated. You must say, "Wait. Let me see". And above all, you must be honest with yourself."

"Being an actor is the loneliest thing in the world. You are all alone with your concentration and imagination, and that's all 
you have."

"Dream as if you have forever. Live as if you only have today."

"Live fast; die young; leave a good-looking corpse behind."

Take a look at some of the previous celebrity stamps:

Groucho Marx
Bette Davis
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Arthur Conan Doyle
Fyodor Dostoevsky

Stamp of an Actor: Groucho Marx

“I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception.”

“One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know.”

“From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.”

“Go, and never darken my towels again.”

“Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long...”

“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”

“Well, my mother and father talked it over and they finally moved to New York, a little house in the Bronx. And it was in that little house that Abraham Lincoln was born, much to my father's surprise. And that, boys and girls, was the beginning of the Lincoln Highway.”

“Do you mind if I don't smoke?”

“Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book — and does.”

“Now there sits a man with an open mind. You can feel the draft from here.”

“Oh, I know it's a penny here and a penny there, but look at me. I worked myself up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty.”

“You're a brave man. Go and break through the lines. And remember, while you're out there risking your life and limb through shot and shell, we'll be in here thinking what a sucker you are.”

“Hello, I must be going.”

© USPS

Stamp of an Actor: 

Bette Davis

"We movie stars all end up by ourselves. Who knows? Maybe we want to."

"I'm the nicest goddamn dame that ever lived."

"From the moment I was six I felt sexy. And let me tell you it was hell, sheer hell, waiting to do something about it."

"Good actors I've worked with all started out making faces in a mirror, and you keep making faces all your life."

"Hollywood always wanted me to be pretty, but I fought for realism."

"I don't take the movies seriously, and anyone who does is in for a headache."

"It's better to be hated for who you are, than to be loved for someone you're not. It's a sign of your worth sometimes, if you're hated by the right people."

"Men become much more attractive when they start looking older. But it doesn't do much for women, though we do have an advantage: make-up."

"To fulfill a dream, to be allowed to sweat over lonely labor, to be given a chance to create, is the meat and potatoes of life. The money is the gravy."

"At 50, I thought proudly, 'Here we are, half century!' Being 60 was fairly frightening. You want to know how I spent my 70th birthday? I put on a completely black face, a fuzzy black afro wig, wore black clothes, and hung a black wreath on my door."

Stamp of a Writer: Edgar Rice Burroughs

© USPS

"No fiction is worth reading except for entertainment. If it entertains and is clean, it is good literature, or its kind. If it forms the habit of reading, in people who might not read otherwise, it is the best literature." 

"I write to escape, to escape poverty."

"As the body rolled to the ground Tarzan of the Apes placed his foot upon the neck of his lifelong enemy and, raising his eyes to the full moon, threw back his fierce young head and voiced the wild and terrible cry of his people."

Stamp of a Writer: Arthur Conan Doyle

“Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outer results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.”

“Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

“My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people do not know.” 

                                                                                   Courtesy: Guernsey Post

Stamp of a Writer: Fyodor Dostoevsky

At home, to begin with, I mainly used to read. I wished to stifle with external sensations all that was ceaselessly boiling up inside me. And among external sensations the only one possible for me was reading. Reading was, of course, a great help—it stirred, delighted, and tormented me. But at times it bored me terribly. I still wanted to move about, and so I'd suddenly sink into some murky, subterranean, vile debauch—not a great, but a measly little debauch. 

— From Notes from the Underground

Stamp of a Singer: Elvis Presley

Music
I'm not kidding myself. My voice alone is just an ordinary voice. What people come to see is how I use it. If I stand still while I'm singing, I'm dead, man. I might as well go back to driving a truck.

Dancing
Some people tap their feet, some people snap their fingers, and some people sway back and forth. I just sorta do 'em all together, I guess.

Stamp of a Filmmaker: 
Walt Disney

Mickey Mouse popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner... Born of necessity, the little fellow literally freed us of immediate worry. He provided the means for expanding our organisation to its present dimensions and for extending the medium, cartoon animation, towards new entertainment levels. He spelled production liberation for us.

Stamp of a Writer: 
Ernest Hemingway

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.

Stamp of an Actor:
Charlie Chaplin

All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl. 

Stamp of a Writer: 
Bertrand Russell

There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.