Most of the most important experiences that truly educate cannot be arranged ahead of time with any precision.

My memories are not of time but of times.

Unless we give part of ourselves away, unless we can live with other people and understand them and help them, we are missing the most essential part of our own human lives.

Unless we give part of ourselves away unless we can live with other people and understand them and help them we are missing the most essential part of our own lives.

The roots of true achievement lie in the will to become the best that you can become.

It wasn't until I was 37 that I grasped the great truth that you've got to write your own books and nobody else's, and then everything followed from there.

Moreover God hath ordained man in this world, as it were, the very image of himself, to the intent, that he, as it were a god on earth, should provide for the wealth of all creatures.

A general never shows despair. He instills confidence in his troops. He leads them forward, even into the mouth of death.

The novel is the one bright book of life. Books are not life. They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble.

Whoever is new to power is always harsh.

We've had the U.N. for almost 60 years, yet we've never actually made a fundamental list of all the big things that we can do in the world, and said, 'Which of them should we do first?'

I don't spend all day running hand-on-hat from shadowy figures - I'm in exile.

But to gain a perfect view, one must go yet further, over a curving brow to a slight shelf on the extreme brink.

We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We're a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don't really have an explanation for.

I hope you learn to love yourself for who you are and what you look like, and how you were born to be, because you are perfect in your own way.