The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed.

Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.

If you're experiencing no anxiety or discomfort, the risk you're taking probably isn't worthy of you. The only risks that aren't a little scary are the ones you've outgrown.

Most people confuse wishing and wanting with pursuing. You must place your trust in action.

Optimism inspires, energizes, and brings out our best. It points the mind toward possibilities and helps us think creatively past problems.

Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere.

No sense being pessimistic. Wouldn't work anyway.

Too much attention on problems kills our faith in possibilities.

The profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.

If you must doubt something, doubt your limits.

Your ethical muscle grows stronger every time you choose right over wrong.

There are no do-overs in life.

Similes are like songs of love: They much describe they nothing prove.

The difference between me and them is that I'll look at Jesse Jackson and I'll see four Jesse Jacksons, and they'll just see one, the clown ambulance chaser.

Life is a do-it-for-others, do-it-yourself project.

You do not get what you want. You get what you negotiate.

Part of the power of song is that it is a beautiful expression of devotion...singing releases the pent-up joy and thanksgiving we feel because of God's grace and goodness.

I write first for myself as a therapeutic process, to get stuff out and to deal with it.

...if I have ever met someone without a single shadow on their heart, it was surely a child too young for speaking.

You can't produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.