All writers - all people - have their stores of private and family legends which lie like a collection of half-forgotten, often violent toys on the floor of memory.

Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.

If you're experiencing no anxiety or discomfort, the risk you're taking probably isn't worthy of you. The only risks that aren't a little scary are the ones you've outgrown.

Most people confuse wishing and wanting with pursuing. You must place your trust in action.

Optimism inspires, energizes, and brings out our best. It points the mind toward possibilities and helps us think creatively past problems.

Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere.

No sense being pessimistic. Wouldn't work anyway.

Too much attention on problems kills our faith in possibilities.

The profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.

If you must doubt something, doubt your limits.

Your ethical muscle grows stronger every time you choose right over wrong.

Reading a book is an intimate experience that can change people's lives in profound ways. It also changes the life of its author.

I have six acres in front of my own house, which I very rarely work on. Most of the work occurs on farmers' fields around me. And I like the discipline of working on other people's land.

Life is an opportunity to contribute love in your own way.

A clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigour of the game.

My problem is that people get intimidated by someone big and beautiful like me. They hate to think I can be smart as well.

I am doing things that are true to me. The only thing I have a problem with is being labeled.

Media is a big problem around the world, it's powerful and can abuse its power.

Work hard, take care of yourself, and you'll be just fine.

Courage comes and goes. Hold on for the next supply.

But I am a just man, even to my enemy - and I will acknowledge, beforehand, that they are cleverer brains than I thought them