You can't compete with Walmart. But you can have smaller businesses that are successful.

In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure.

I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.

Every closed eye is not sleeping, and every open eye is not seeing.

People can be more forgiving than you can imagine. But you have to forgive yourself. Let go of what's bitter and move on.

Nothing I've ever done has given me more joys and rewards than being a father to my children.

Fatherhood is pretending the present you love most is soap-on-a-rope.

I wasn't always black... there was this freckle, and it got bigger and bigger.

Raising children is an incredibly hard and risky business in which no cumulative wisdom is gained: each generation repeats the mistakes the previous one made.

It isn't a matter of black is beautiful as much as it is white is not all that's beautiful.

The main goal of the future is to stop violence. The world is addicted to it.

The essence of oppression is that one is defined from the outside by those who define themselves as superior by criteria of their own choice.

Marry on Monday for health, Tuesday for wealth, Wednesday the best day of all, Thursday for crosses, Friday for losses, and Saturday for no luck at all.

There is only one way to end a self-pity cycle: stop comparing yourself to others and simply follow Christ.

He's so busy looking inside people to find the good that he misses the knife they're holding in their hand.

The worst takes its time to come, and then to pass.

I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.

Well, I think any national championship is an extremely important championship to play in.

Everything you use in a modern life style has to be made using a tool of some sort.

A number of things in Dhalgren are just meant to function as mysteries. They're mysteries when the book begins, and they're mysteries when the book ends.

That was one problem with dramatic exits: Sometimes they wound up making you look like a bubblehead.