Siren voices tell me, ‚You don’t have to keep going on.‘ And then you think, ‚I’m a writer. What do I do? Sit there watching my wife clean up?‘ I don’t know. I like being a writer.

I hated every minute of training, but I said, ‚Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.‘

Anytime someone tells me that I can’t do something, I want to do it more.

I’m interested in what motivates individuals to participate in atrocious acts to support their ideological identification.

A great thing can only be done by a great person; and they do it without effort.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.

My favorite literary heroine is Jo March. It is hard to overstate what she meant to a small, plain girl called Jo, who had a hot temper and a burning ambition to be a writer.

With all singers, insecurity is your best security. That’s why we’re such loud people and why we walk all funny. You think, ‚Are people interested?‘ But I think our band has something and they know we don’t just put albums out. We do think about it.

I believe God, Jesus, died that we not just go to Heaven but that we excel in this life. I never think you make money your goal… God wants you to excel. Just keep Him in first place, and God will open up doors you never dreamed of.

Pretension is a poor joke that you play on yourself. Snap out of it. Recognise your strengths, work on your weaknesses. Real achievement is liking what you see in the mirror every morning.

We all have a tendency to avoid our weaknesses. When we do that, we never progress or get any better.

I’m looking for backing for an unauthorized auto-biography that I am writing. Hopefully, this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I will play everybody.

You can become an even more excellent person by constantly setting higher and higher standards for yourself and then by doing everything possible to live up to those standards.

I used to get the feeling, and sometimes I still get it, that sometimes I was fooling somebody; I don’t know who or what, maybe myself.

There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.

Everything negative – pressure, challenges – is all an opportunity for me to rise.

Defeat doesn’t finish a man, quit does. A man is not finished when he’s defeated. He’s finished when he quits.

I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.

Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings.

You can get help from teachers, but you are going to have to learn a lot by yourself, sitting alone in a room.

Today is life-the only life you are sure of. Make the most of today. Get interested in something. Shake yourself awake. Develop a hobby. Let the winds of enthusiasm sweep through you. Live today with gusto.

What good are fans? You can’t eat applause for breakfast. You can’t sleep with it.

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

Act, and God will act.

One is lucky to be born in a place where no one is doing it, because then you can say, ‚Well, obviously I can write better than everyone else in high school.‘ You have no idea of the competition.

It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.

I’m not very ambitious at all.

It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning.

In the future, you won’t buy artists‘ works; you’ll buy software that makes original pieces of ‚their‘ works, or that recreates their way of looking at things. You could buy a Shostakovich box, or you could buy a Brahms box. You might want some Shostakovich slow-movement-like music to be generated. So then you use that box.

I think the great part about what I do is that there’s a scoreboard. At the end of every week, you know how you did. You know how well you prepared. You know whether you executed your game plan. There’s a tangible score.

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

Life is a journey. When we stop, things don’t go right.

Don’t be too harsh to these poems until they’re typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.

This is a world of action, and not for moping and droning in.

There is no comparison between that which is lost by not succeeding and that which is lost by not trying.

I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.

Success is steady progress toward one’s personal goals.

I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death. They thought nobody can make a living from being a writer in Brazil. They were not wrong.

If what you did yesterday seems big, you haven’t done anything today.

You just do what you can and you have as much fun as possible.

If you want to shine like a sun, first burn like a sun.

If there be no enemy there’s no fight. If no fight, no victory and if no victory there is no crown.

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.

Part of the issue of achievement is to be able to set realistic goals, but that’s one of the hardest things to do because you don’t always know exactly where you’re going, and you shouldn’t.

America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

If I had a stock of fabulous sounds I would just always use them. I wouldn’t bother to find new ones.

I undertake the same project as Montaigne, but with an aim contrary to his own: for he wrote his Essays only for others, and I write my reveries only for myself.

I think that the idea of having a different approach to every single one of my albums is so exciting to me. I never want to make the same record twice. Why do it? What’s the point?

I know some people might think it odd – unworthy even – for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people’s poet so I write for the people.

Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realised that the imagery in my mind wasn’t insanity. Surrealism to me is reality.

I’ve always felt that what I have going for me is not my imagination, because everyone has an imagination. What I have is a relentlessly controlled imagination. What looks like wild invention is actually quite carefully calculated.

The greatest story of all is Colonel Sanders. He didn’t start until he was sixty-six on a freeway bypass for his chicken shop. Anything is possible!

I was a housewife, so I learned to write in times off, and I don’t think I ever gave it up, though there were times when I was very discouraged because I began to see that the stories I was writing were not very good, that I had a lot to learn, and that it was a much, much harder job than I had expected.

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.

Pessimism never won any battle.

Everything rises and falls on leadership.

Every noble work is at first impossible.

I am not a self-help writer. I am a self-problem writer. When people read my books, I provoke some things. I cannot justify my work. I do my work; it is up to them to classify it, to judge.

In order for the light to shine so brightly, the darkness must be present.

If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.

I’m always afraid of failing. I have to quiet that fear if I’m going to get up in the morning.