For while agents and editors often misunderstand their market and sometimes reject good or even great works, they do prevent a vast quantity of truly execrable writing from being published.

A faint smell of lilac filled the air. There was always lilac in this part of town. Where there were grandmothers, there was always lilac.

But there is so much more to do for the city we love... a Dallas with roads as strong as our businesses, parks as beautiful as our children, a downtown as tall as our imagination.

Dallas is a great city, and it's worth fighting for.

Buying a book is not about obtaining a possession, but about securing a portal.

In many ways, our campaign this year will be the same as last time: We're still going to focus on fixing up basics and cleaning up ethics at City Hall.

Now it's time to focus on basics for people in our neighborhoods... and real ethics reform at City Hall.

The city has to do what any citizen or family does, when you have a dream. You tighten your belt. You sacrifice some luxuries. Above all, you don't waste a dime.

The first book we fall in love with shapes us every bit as much as the first person we fall in love with.

Dallas is a positive, get-it done city.

The conditions conducive to deep thought have become increasingly rare in our highly mediated lives... Now we live in an attention economy, where the most in-demand commodity is 'eyeballs.

In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.

Self-determination is self-reliance.

Uncommunicated expectations are the shame of relationships.

In the end, we would like not to be guilty while at the same time being dispensed of the effort of purifying ourselves. Not enough cynicism and not enough virtue.

One of the things about working on Star Trek that was always so great was that we all got along as well as we did. We really became family.

My president will boldly throw 1 million into poverty.

I love Black Sabbath. They made an amazing contribution to music today. Almost every band that made it big in the Nineties owed a debt to them.

It is not the visions but the activity which makes you happy, and the joy and glory of the flier is the flight itself.

No matter what you are doing, keep the undercurrent of happiness. Learn to be secretly happy within your heart in spite of all circumstances.

And as he spoke, I was thinking, 'the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn stories into.