My wife was a beautiful woman before we had children.

In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure.

I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.

Every closed eye is not sleeping, and every open eye is not seeing.

People can be more forgiving than you can imagine. But you have to forgive yourself. Let go of what's bitter and move on.

Nothing I've ever done has given me more joys and rewards than being a father to my children.

Fatherhood is pretending the present you love most is soap-on-a-rope.

I wasn't always black... there was this freckle, and it got bigger and bigger.

Raising children is an incredibly hard and risky business in which no cumulative wisdom is gained: each generation repeats the mistakes the previous one made.

It isn't a matter of black is beautiful as much as it is white is not all that's beautiful.

The main goal of the future is to stop violence. The world is addicted to it.

If you love a person, you should show it in adundance, not reserve it for special occasions like fine china.

It's my new best friend, Claudius Templesmith, and as I expected it, he's inviting us to a feast.

I had used my sense of humor; I had called it proportion, perspective. But perspective is distance.

A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.

Mostly, as I said, a desire to do a bit of good, and the quaint notion that this is what we signed up for, this is the business that we have chosen.

I started writing when I was twenty. My first book came out when I was thirty-five. But I never expected that it would happen quickly.

The secret to a happy marriage? Do whatever your wife tells you. 'Yes, dear.' And breathe.

Paths clear before those who know where they're going and are determined to get there.

I could get an audience into my world and if you can do that, they'll go with you not all the way, but a lot of the way.

I never starved myself.