The difference between school and life? In school, you're taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you're given a test that teaches you a lesson.

In school, you're taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you're given a test that teaches you a lesson.

They say a person needs just three things to be truly happy in this world: someone to love, something to do, and something to hope for.

The difference between an optimist and a pessimist? An optimist laughs to forget, but a pessimist forgets to laugh.

I come from very common stock, and I've always been uncomfortable with pretension and all the forms it can take, including disingenuous broadcasting.

You can make a new friend but you can't make an old one.

That's what the American odyssey is really about: Leaving home. Leaving home and coming home, and trying to understand the difference.

In the America I see from here, anything is possible - especially the impossible.

Mine is not a story to tell struggling writers.

Americans are generally very self-sufficient and I think generally averse to pretension, just as I am.

Professor Al Drake encouraged me to just write the way I talk. I decided if that's what I needed to do, I didn't need to be in school to do it.

The Purpose of Friendship to Me is Having One to Complement Not One to Compete with!

It is time to stop standing at the edges of rooms. Hugging the walls. Living in my head. Wishing I had something to say.

How do you say, 'Do things for me without me asking you to' since in saying that, you are asking them?

Guilty she might be. But what human being was not? There were things in her past she needn't be ashamed of, things to be proud of; she wouldn't surrender so meekly to a condemning judgment.

I paint my joy and I sing my sorrow.

You may protest if you can love the person you are protesting against as much as you love yourself.

The step between ecstatic vision and sinful frenzy is all too brief.

Gratitude will lead your mind out along the ways by which things come, and it will keep you in close harmony with creative thought and prevent you from falling into competitive thought.

Don't look back until you've written an entire draft.