If we can't meet with our friends, I don't know how we're going to lead the world in terms of dealing with critical issues like terrorism.

You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you.

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

Keep exploring. Keep dreaming. Keep asking why. Don’t settle for what you already know. Never stop believing in the power of your ideas, your imagination, your hard work to change the world.

When ignorant folks want to advertise their ignorance, you don't really have to do anything, you just let them talk.

Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail.

Change is never easy, but always possible.

Don’t ever let anybody tell you that your efforts don’t matter or that your voice doesn’t count. Don’t ever believe that you can’t make a difference. You have.

Where you are right now doesn't have to determine where you'll end up.

Learning to stand in somebody else's shoes, to see through their eyes, that's how peace begins. And it's up to you to make that happen. Empathy is a quality of character that can change the world.

If somebody is different from you, that's not something you criticize, that's something that you appreciate.

What lies ahead? Worrying about it or creating it. Both requires a choice, one opens the door.

J.W. and Roy didn’t just snatch the childhood away from Emmett

Judeo-Christian conservatism overcomes natural selfishness.

It's always a challenge to discover the most effective first sentence, and the most effective final sentence, in a chapter for instance, and in the book as a whole.

Fiction is often a much-needed step back that gives you the distance to see things more clearly; it's very often better at explaining why events happened as opposed to just what happened.

It's hard to act in the morning. The muse isn't even awake.

Painting is sometimes like those recipes where you do all manner of elaborate things to a duck, and then end up putting it on one side and only using the skin.

Be yourself! Be individualistic!' he called out after me. 'But for God's sake get your hair cut. You look like an oddball.

If you go 72-11 and don't win (the championship), it doesn't mean anything. Actually it does. It means you've cheated and played an extra regular-season game.

Some of my best men are women!