Try to be better than yourself.

You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.

Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.

To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.

Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.

Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.

Don't do what you can do - try what you can't do.

There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn't fool with booze until he's fifty; then he's a damn fool if he doesn't.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.

The pain of the journey should challenge you to make change, the vision of what could be drives you forward.

When you turn that fantasy into a fact, you are in a position to build even better fantasies. And that, my friend, is the Creative Process.

God has neither form nor shape under which we can know Him; when he speaks of Himself in metaphors and similes, He is adapting Himself to our foolishness, our limited capacity.

Elvis may have fueled rock & roll's imagery, but Chuck Berry was its heartbeat and original mindset.

There can be many different views of what Heaven is like, because Heaven is whatever makes each person eternally and fully happy.

The disaster... is what escapes the very possibility of experience—it is the limit of writing. This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes.

My life/career is more filled with left-field thrills than I could ever have hoped for.

Engaging Iran won't guarantee improved U.S.-Iranian relations or a more stable Gulf region. But not engaging means more of the same.

My goal as a creative person is to express truth and beauty in whatever I do

As a bookish adolescent, I sopped up texts as if I were blotting paper and they were fluid.