Bitterness is a greater failure than failure.

Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean.

Nothing important comes with instructions.

What is more yours than what always holds you back?

The best way to know your faults is to notice which ones you accuse others of.

Writing is like washing windows in the sun. With every attempt to perfect clarity, you make a new smear.

When I am trying to write I turn on music so I can hear what is keeping me from hearing.

Sophistication is upscale conformity.

The happy and the suffering probably understand life equally well, but the sufferers may see a little more clearly how little it is that they understand.

It is the empty seats that listen most raptly.

All work is the avoidance of harder work.

A little goes a long way in Somalia: $5 will feed a person there for about two weeks.

Each man was his own executioner and his own victim.

I always say you can self-medicate through closet cleaning. Everyone knows that feeling of a clear surface, and how it makes you feel you can really focus and start your work.

I've spent a lot of my life among people brighter than myself.

All societies establish laws that become norms. Those norms create the environment that incubates society. So, when you implement the laws of God in society, they produce a culture of heaven.

We have to end the capitalist system. We have to make love our value. You are rich when you love and you are rich when you are giving away your time and what you have to help other people.

You need not fear to handle the truth roughly. She is no invalid.

Life without the courage to die is slavery.

My father was a poor man, very poor in a British colonial possession where class and race were very important.

I think death is just a transition to another state of consciousness.