I have no ambition to surprise my reader. Castles with unknown passages are not compatible with my homely muse.

An author must be nothing if he do not love truth; a barrister must be nothing if he do.

When the ivy has found its tower, when the delicate creeper has found its strong wall, we know how the parasite plants grow and prosper.

Never think that you're not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. People will take you very much at your own reckoning.

Fame is a skittish jade, more fickle even than Fortune, and apt to shy, and bolt, and plunge away on very trifling causes.

What on earth could be more luxurious than a sofa, a book, and a cup of coffee?...Was ever anything so civil?

The habit of reading is the only one I know in which there is no alloy. It lasts when all other pleasures fade.

There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.

It has now become the doctrine of a large clan of politicians that political honesty is unnecessary, slow, subversive of a man's interests, and incompatible with quick onward movement.

There is no royal road to learning; no short cut to the acquirement of any art.

Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it.

When you have a plan in your mind of what the best life is for you, but it doesn't match your life, you have pain.

If you can socialize from the privacy of your desk at night in a dark room, you can be a smoother, cooler, funnier, sexy, more everything person than you actually are in real life.

The ability to help the people around me self-actualize their goals underlines the single aspect of my abilities and the label that I value most—teacher.

If you don't feel you have something to prove every day, you'll never improve

I ran the high school newspaper and was in student government. I played sports my whole life but was never picked as captain.

Because it equates tradition with prejudice, the left finds itself increasingly unable to converse with ordinary people in their common language.

I just dress up what the Good Lord provides.

I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway.

I am more convinced than ever that mindsets toward learning could matter more than anything else we teach.

I confess, I'm not the biggest fan of Twilight.