You have to be eligible for luck to strike and I think that's a matter of education and preparation and character and all the other solid attributes that sometimes people laugh at.

I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.

Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries.

Don't put off for tomorrow what you can do today because if you enjoy it today, you can do it again tomorrow.

The really great writers are people like Emily Brontë who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.

Scientists dream about doing great things. Engineers do them.

I have never thought of myself as a good writer. Anyone who wants reassurance of that should read one of my first drafts. But I'm one of the world's great rewriters.

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.

If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay home.

If your book doesn't keep you up nights when you are writing it, it won't keep anyone up nights reading it.

An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.

She understood how a world jammed with phones, email, and faxes could still leave you feeling utterly alone.

Here's where redesign begins in earnest, where we stop trying to be less bad and we start figuring out how to be good.

The most important thing you can ever know is that no matter what your purpose is, that's not your only choice.

All the great works of art, the cathedrals - the Gothic cathedrals and the splendid Baroque churches - are a luminous sign of God, and thus are truly a manifestation, an epiphany of God.

Things in the margins, including humans who wander there, are often on the brink of becoming someone else, or something else, whose memory may not include the significance of old markers.

Every week a tsunami rips through poor towns and villages all over the world ... That tsunami is hunger.

If knowledge is power, then curiosity is the muscle.

Things change…things happen…things you can’t even imagine when you’re young and full of hope.

There were moments when I really just thought, I don't need anything and I don't need anyone. I just want to go away and disappear.

First things first, second things never.