I feel like I was writing as I was learning to talk. Writing was always a go-to form of communication. And I knew I could sing from being in tune with the radio.

Yeah, I like to keep myself interested – I’ll kind of throw myself into some area that I don’t completely know or understand, that I’m not adept at, so I’m forced to swim in order to stay afloat. There’s a good feeling that comes from that.

When we turn to one another for counsel we reduce the number of our enemies.

Money is an unavoidable consequence, but it isn’t the reason I write; if it was, I wouldn’t have written any of the YA books, because advances in that field are small compared to what I’d got now for an ‚adult‘ DW.

Don’t ever call a guy first. The thing they want the most is whatever they can’t have. It sounds really juvenile, but it works.

Never say no when a client asks for something, even if it is the moon. You can always try, and anyhow there is plenty of time afterwards to explain that it was not possible.

Children wish fathers looked but with their eyes; fathers that children with their judgment looked; and either may be wrong.

As his vice president for eight years, I learned more from Ronald Reagan than from anyone I encountered in all my years of public life.

Every three months, I’ll say, ‚Honey, I think I should learn how to cook‘.

I’m grateful for the opportunities God gave me to minister to people in high places; people in power have spiritual and personal needs like everyone else, and often they have no one to talk to.

It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

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.

No man who worships education has got the best out of education… Without a gentle contempt for education no man’s education is complete.

Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.

We want everybody to act like adults, quit playing games, realize that it’s not just my way or the highway.

‚Two Voices,‘ from my album with Peter Schwalm, is an intact dream-poem. I awoke one night with an image of a piece of paper and all the words of the poem written on it, so I just blundered down to the kitchen table and ‚copied it out.‘

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.

I don’t know about you, but most of my exchanges with cashiers are not that meaningful.

Who questions much, shall learn much, and retain much.

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art.

I learned to fly a few years ago in England. It’s the only place I’m completely alone – up in the air, detached from everything.

The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it’s a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.

If you don’t feel safe as a child, you can’t learn.

I know I’m talented, but I wasn’t put here to sing. I was put here to be a wife and a mom and look after my family. I love what I do, but it’s not where it begins and ends.

One thing that I tell people all the time is, ‚I’m not going to answer a call from you after nine o’clock at night or before nine o’clock in the morning unless it’s an emergency.‘

Failure is not a single, cataclysmic event. You don’t fail overnight. Instead, failure is a few errors in judgement, repeated every day.

I am a good listener. I think that came from my schooling.

I don’t think about who the audience is for my books.

Education forms the common mind. Just as the twig is bent, the tree’s inclined.

By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man’s, I mean.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

I won’t be satisfied until people want to hear me sing without looking at me. Of course, that doesn’t mean I want them to stop looking.

Charm is a way of getting the answer ‚Yes‘ without asking a clear question.

If you’re nice to me I’ll never write anything bad about you.

When you are trying to impress people with words, the more you say, the more common you appear, and the less in control. Even if you are saying something banal, it will seem original if you make it vague, open-ended, and sphinxlike.

Each day we understand better what the Indians say, and they us, so that very often we are intelligible to each other.

Harvard makes mistakes too, you know. Kissinger taught there.

When I tell a child something the first time, I’m nice. The 15th time, I start to get aggravated.

It is our moral obligation to give every child the very best education possible.

What makes you a SEAL, what makes you a SEAL is being a good tactician on the battle field, understanding how to shoot, move, and communicate, knowing small unit maneuver warfare. That’s what makes a good SEAL, and so that is the course of instruction that I taught, was getting SEAL platoons ready for deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

The main problem with writing in verse is, if your fourth line doesn’t come out right, you’ve got to throw four lines away and figure out a whole new way to attack the problem. So the mortality rate is terrific.

I cannot claim to have had a hard time publishing.

Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you’re forced back on your own imagination.

I don’t understand why or how we can bully each other.

I don’t hate women – they just sometimes make me mad.

Whoever the coach is, my job is to talk to him, understand him and be a better player under him and give my best.

To me, constructive criticism is when people take ownership of their ideas. That’s why I don’t listen to anything that’s anonymous. But it’s hard; when there’s something hurtful out there, I still want to read it over and over and memorize it and explain my point of view to the person.

Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders.

I didn’t get trained by the school system like other kids, and when I did concentrate on learning, my mind was cluttered and locked by the programming of the system.

The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.

A man is more frank and sincere with his emotions than a woman. We girls, I’m afraid, have a tendency to hide our feelings.

Here in the West, people often don’t like listening to their leaders, even if they are right.

I don’t have faith in young people any more. I don’t waste time trying to communicate with them.

That’s another hallmark of truth, is that it snaps things together. People write to me all the time and say it’s as if things were coming together in my mind. It’s like the Platonic idea that all learning was remembering. You have a nature, and when you feel that nature articulated, it’s it’s like the act of snapping the puzzle pieces together.

Lying is not only saying what isn’t true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler.

To find out your real opinion of someone, judge the impression you have when you first see a letter from them.

I started writing as a child. But I didn’t think of myself actually writing until I was in college. And I had gone to Africa as a sophomore or something – no, maybe junior – and wrote a book of poems. And that was my beginning. I published that book.

Fear not those who argue but those who dodge.

When I’m really interested in something, I get superfocused on that. And I can spend hours upon hours not getting tired of reading about it and still be interested to learn more about it.

Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.

Any man is liable to err, only a fool persists in error.