Starting is easy. Finishing is hard.

The currency of blogging is authenticity and trust.

Fortunes are built during the down market and collected in the up market.

There is no luck, you work hard and study things intently. If you do that for long and hard enough you're successful.

No one remembers how you got there, only that you got there.

Excellence is everything today, and most people aren't excellent. If you're not excellent - like truly excellent at what you do - you're toast.

People's reputations are made in the bad times more than the good times.

I get a lot of emails from entrepreneurs. The best ones are short, to the point and include some question and/or the product

Blogging is great, and I read blogs all day long. However, my goal is really to have a deep, meaningful discussion with people. For some reason, I'm able to accomplish this best via email.

If you can't sell your product, it's not a product-it's a hobby.

Longevity is a big part of credibility.

I'm a writer to the bone. I love this language you and I read, write and speak. It's called English. And I'm seriously doubting that it's known to some of the unseen people who write the news.

I feel very blessed we can still have a career making music.

You can do pretty much anything you want in this world, and it's not all that difficult - you just have to ignore the people who tell you that you need to go this way, and it's the only way.

I think that the pageant world overall is pretty spectacular, it just makes you feel good about yourself and leaves you with great friends.

You have to be a little scared of what you're doing. Otherwise, you just paint the same masterpiece a little worse.

Recognition of the reality of evil necessarily relativizes the good, and the evil likewise, converting both into halves of a paradoxical whole.

I often lose myself in the Sudoku-like challenges of making a book work.

The drive to learn is as strong as the sexual drive. It begins earlier and lasts longer

You've got to destroy a few lives on the way to where you want to get.

[Barack Obama] will touch you on the shoulder and, you know - in that big brother or father figure kind of way. And you really do feel sort of shepherded by him.