Working with Mike Leigh is a process of distillation.

I have wished to see chemistry applied to domestic objects, to malting, for instance, brewing, making cider, to fermentation and distillation generally, to the…

— Thomas Jefferson

And to use something as elegant as a tree? Imagine this design assignment: Design something that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water,…

— William McDonough

Poetry is an act of distillation. It takes contingency samples, is selective. It telescopes time. It focuses what most often floods past us in…

— Diane Ackerman

To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.

— Don DeLillo

History is the distillation of rumour.

— Thomas Carlyle

This is an age of intellectual sauces, of essence, of distillation. We have conclusions without deductions, abridgments of history and abridgments of science without…

— Benjamin Haydon

I wrote poetry in middle school and high school and even through college. It was bad. I just don't think I'm very good at…

— Jesmyn Ward

With impeccable timing and a fine instinct for the telling detail, Francesca Abbate evokes the plenitudes and the deprivations of human habitation, the nurturing…

— Linda Gregerson

When you set about your composing, it may be necessary for your ease, and better distillation of wit, to put on your worst clothes,…

— Jonathan Swift

Petroleum is the product of a distillation from great depth and issues from the primitive rocks beneath which the forces of all volcanic action…

— Alexander von Humboldt

“Once he left the Haywood out for her with a page number on a scrap of paper, and she opened the book to recipes…

— Allegra Goodman

History: A distillation of rumor.

— Thomas Carlyle

Civilization begins with distillation

— William Faulkner

You know, there's an economy in lyric-writing that doesn't afford you, or at least me - I usually start off with nine or 10…

— J Tillman

Most of life on Earth has a deep past, much deeper than ours. And we have benefited from the distillation of all preceding history,…

— Sylvia Earle