The first book we fall in love with shapes us every bit as much as the first person we fall in love with.

A faint smell of lilac filled the air. There was always lilac in this part of town. Where there were grandmothers, there was always lilac.

But there is so much more to do for the city we love... a Dallas with roads as strong as our businesses, parks as beautiful as our children, a downtown as tall as our imagination.

Dallas is a great city, and it's worth fighting for.

Buying a book is not about obtaining a possession, but about securing a portal.

In many ways, our campaign this year will be the same as last time: We're still going to focus on fixing up basics and cleaning up ethics at City Hall.

Now it's time to focus on basics for people in our neighborhoods... and real ethics reform at City Hall.

The city has to do what any citizen or family does, when you have a dream. You tighten your belt. You sacrifice some luxuries. Above all, you don't waste a dime.

Dallas is a positive, get-it done city.

The conditions conducive to deep thought have become increasingly rare in our highly mediated lives... Now we live in an attention economy, where the most in-demand commodity is 'eyeballs.

Do the children who prefer books set in the real, ordinary, workaday world ever read as obsessively as those who would much rather be transported into other worlds entirely?

Critic, relent!Your hope for repentanceWill meet with disapppointment.For this is the life,Not desert tents,Not camel's milk!

I never got down with conveying a larger-than-life vibe.

I'm just vibrant. I try to bring that to everything I do.

If you are a blackman in America and get stopped by the police, make sure you have a vidio camera. Don't rely on some passerby to film the beating. Rodney King was just lucky.

I'm not saying that I don't experience people in life as evil, but writing is not a place of alienation; writing is the place where we can try to be human.

You are worth so much more than points on a scoreboard or wins vs. losses. The best athletes I know are also some of the best people I've ever met.

This is what I find encouraging about the writing trades: ... They allow lunatics to seem saner than sane.

I don't consider anything I'm doing as generous. In the new model of the world, I hope people will consider whatever I'm doing as just normal.

Russia is still the leader in world space exploration. But its position of leader involves great responsibility - we have no right to lag behind. We can and we must move constantly forward.

Writing is almost a place of dreams for me, and I don't have to give up anything to do it.