If your only tool is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail.

What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.

If I were dropped out of a plane into the ocean and told the nearest land was a thousand miles away, I'd still swim. And I'd despise the one who gave up.

It isn't normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.

It seems that the necessary thing to do is not to fear mistakes, to plunge in, to do the best that one can, hoping to learn enough from blunders to correct them eventually.

We need not take refuge in supernatural gods to explain our saints and sages and heroes and statesmen, as if to explain our disbelief that mere unaided human beings could be that good or wise.

The most stable, and therefore, the most healthy self-esteem is based on deserved respect from others rather than on external fame or celebrity and unwarranted adulation.

I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.

Obviously the most beautiful fate, the most wonderful good fortune that can happen to any human being, is to be paid for doing that which he passionately loves to do.

In a word, growth and improvement can come through pain and conflict.

Perhaps adjustment and stabilization, while good because it cuts your pain, is also bad because development towards a higher ideal ceases?

It takes some courage to write fiction about politically controversial topics. The dread is you'll be labeled a political writer.

Tom Cruise only makes one or two film appearances a year. A baseball player can be the hero or the goat one-hundred and sixty-two times a year.

If you don't pursue what you think will be most meaningful, you will regret it. Life is long. There is always time for Plan B. But don't begin with it.

Well, I'm completely normal and mellow.

If your friend's friend's friend (whom you may not have even met) is obese, a smoker or a zealot of some kind then it is a lot more likely that you will be too.

I feel your scorn, and I accept it.

Do not go about complaining how hard it is to live in this world. such behavior is entirely unworthy of a real man.

Freud was one of the greatest influences on me. He made myth into psychiatry, and I've been trying to turn it back into myth again.

That signal's come and gone a lot in my life-time, that prairie progressivism died . I think prairie progressivism is still there. Every once in a while, odd things take place.

Here is a language so far ahead of its time, that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors, but also on nearly all its successors.