I come from very common stock, and I've always been uncomfortable with pretension and all the forms it can take, including disingenuous broadcasting.

In school, you're taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you're given a test that teaches you a lesson.

They say a person needs just three things to be truly happy in this world: someone to love, something to do, and something to hope for.

The difference between an optimist and a pessimist? An optimist laughs to forget, but a pessimist forgets to laugh.

You can make a new friend but you can't make an old one.

That's what the American odyssey is really about: Leaving home. Leaving home and coming home, and trying to understand the difference.

In the America I see from here, anything is possible - especially the impossible.

Mine is not a story to tell struggling writers.

Americans are generally very self-sufficient and I think generally averse to pretension, just as I am.

Professor Al Drake encouraged me to just write the way I talk. I decided if that's what I needed to do, I didn't need to be in school to do it.

Like most Alaska immigrants, my roots continue to petition for equal time.

Writing is the geometry of the soul.

I denied Discordia and regret nothing

Absence of occupation is not rest A mind quite vacant is a mind distress'd.

We wonder why we don't have faith; the answer is, faith is confidence in the character of God and if we don't know what kind of God God is, we can't have faith.

The virtuous will be sure to speak uprightly; but those whose speech is upright may not be virtuous.

Eternity does not mean infinite time, but simply timelessness

Embrace truth as it is revealed to-day by human reason.

Debt is a trap which man sets and baits himself, and then deliberately gets into.

My whole life was foretold to me. An old Romany gypsy read my fortune.

The Cayman Islands, a British Crown colony in the Caribbean, for instance, is the fifth largest banking center in the world.