When you’re still too young to shave, optimism is a perfectly legitimate response to failure.

you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.

The road to hell is paved with adverbs.

When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.

Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.

Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.

Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.

The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting.

Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity.

The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.

To write is human, to edit is divine.

If I had even a slight awareness, and practiced the Great Way, what I would fear would be deviating from it.

Everyone has a belief system in his or her mind, a story about the way they think the world actually is, even if they haven't thought about it much or worked out all the details.

And now, I'm thinking again, isn't there something we can do about something we can't do anything about?

Every way of life produces its own environment and in turn is influenced by that environment.

When I say to the Moment flying; 'Linger a while -- thou art so fair!' Then bind me in thy bonds undying, And my final ruin I will bear!

A person's level of income and their desire to give have nothing to do with one another.

You can't delete racism. It's like a cigarette. You can't stop smoking if you don't want to, and you can't stop racism if people don't want to. But I'll do everything I can to help.

I have a strong disrespect for authority and for rules. Including gravity. Gravity sucks.

Don't try to be the 'next'. Instead, try to be the other, the changer, the new.

Passenger rail development takes time, but good things come to those who are patient and stay the course.