Writing is not "the establishment of a professional reputation" as if one were a doctor or lawyer; it is not properly in the sentence with creation of a family and the purchase of a home.

The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

The greatest gift is a passion for reading.

Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.

Adversity is a great teacher, but this teacher makes us pay dearly for its instruction; and often the profit we derive, is not worth the price we paid.

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.

The famous carry about with them a great weight of patriarchal baggage-the footnotes of their lives.

The fifties - they seem to have taken place on a sunny afternoon that asked nothing of you except a drifting belief in the moment and its power to satisfy.

Sometimes one has the feeling of an almost supernatural character to the shifts and changes in our national mood. They appear beyond the prose of cause and effect.

Self-love is an idolatry. Self-hatred is a tragedy.

When you travel your first discovery is that you do not exist.

Once your vision is clarified and stated, do not look back

Faith is generated in the atmosphere of experiencing truth.

Pop music is a fashion, and fashions come and go. The public retires you as their tastes change.

Pitching... sometimes I did so poorly, it brought me to tears

I'm making people that happy. How cool is that? That's my job.

In the early 1980s, I burned my Social Security card at the New Orleans Investment Conference in protest of the state pension system.

Worship of Jesus is rather harmless and risk-free; actually following Jesus changes everything.

If you have any of these qualities... love, kindness, compassion, sincerity and truth in your heart.... you will always find your way home.

Life rarely presents fully finished photographs. An image evolves, often from a single strand of visual interest - a distant horizon, a moment of light, a held expression.

You can't put something together again unless you've torn it apart first.