Being an unpublished novelist has about as much social acceptability as being a shopping bag lady.

Sometimes skulls are thick. Sometimes hearts are vacant. Sometimes words don't work.

When I started writing 'A Million Little Pieces,' I felt like it was the right story with the style I had been looking for, and I just kept going.

The wounds that never heal can only be mourned alone.

And loss of control is always the source of fear. It is also, however, always the source of change.

Be strong. Live honorably and with dignity. When you don't think you can, hold on.

Let things be, let yourself be, let everything be and accept it as it is. Nothing more. Nothing less.

And as ridiculous as it may sound, sometimes all any of us needs in life is for someone to hold our hand and walk next to us.

When something is staring you in the face in your life and you see it with your own two eyes and feel it within your heart only a fool doesn't believe it to be true.

The afternoon and the early evening slide by in a lidded daze where the ability to think in any identifiable way disappears and where every moment seems to be an eternity.

I always wanted to be the outlaw. And that's to a certain extent how I've lived.

There is not a single outward mark of courtesy that does not have a deep moral basis.

Elite is not a bad word, it's an aspirational one.

To be able to forget means sanity.

All we ever got in those [early] days was "Where are you from? Liverpool? You'll have to be in London before you can do it. Nobody's ever done it from Liverpool.

Most lay-ups and two foot jump shots around the goal are missed by not putting the ball up high enough on the backboard

As you know from reading many of these Negro writers, we don't deal too much with the discussion of democracy and what it means and how improvisation fits in all that.

We hold on STEVE's still smiling face as MICHAEL passes by. STEVE's eyes follow MICHAEL out of the room and then the smile disappears. It is replaced by a look of hunger and desolation.

Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves

I'm a minor player in my own life story.

It did not matter, after all. He was only one man. One man's fate is not important. "If it is not, what is?" He could not endure those remembered words.