Committing unnecessary surgeries is very, very rare. And it's very wrong.

I like to write with a lot of emotion and a lot of power. Sometimes I overdo it; sometimes my prose is a little bit too purple, and I know that.

I always had a curiosity about Texas. I had a curiosity about small-town life, although, granted, Odessa's not a tiny town.

If someone is going to criticize what you've written and you believe in what you've written then you should respond.

Teams are made up of a lot of components. They're made up of hunger, they're made up of desire, they're made up of chemistry, and they're made up of emotion.

Athletics: it's a wonderful thing, it's a spell-binding thing, nothing in life has quite as much pageantry, as much emotion within a finite time frame, it's incredibly exciting.

If you leave your wife and you don't ever contact her again, that says something about how you felt about the marriage.

Maybe it's a tired tale, but without an education, you're not going to go anywhere.

One of the exciting things about reporting is going to places you've never been to before.

One of the inspirations for my becoming a writer was the baseball board game Strat-O-Matic.

Well I just always wanted to be a newspaper reporter.

Better an if then, than an oops.

At the end of the world, music always played on like a bad movie.

PROMISING, VOWING...cannot earn us trust. Trust can't be generated overnight. No SHORT CUT! It takes DOING over a very long period of time.

Don't kneel to me, that is not right. You must kneel to God only, and thank Him for the liberty you will hereafter enjoy.

I've always loved the fashion of the '30s and everything that came with the Art Deco era - the jewelry and the glamour.

The reason you write [songs] is because there's something you want to say that is important to you - enough to go through all the torture of writing.

To the receptive soul the river of life pauseth not, nor is diminished.

A toleration of slavery is, in effect, a toleration of inhumanity.

I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.

To make real change, you have to be well anchored - not only in the belief that it can be done, but also in some pretty real ways about who you are and what you can do.