I never had to choose a subject – my subject rather chose me.

We should play free football, defend lively with a passion, and have the best understanding in offence.

Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.

A word after a word after a word is power.

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.

People do not decide to become extraordinary. They decide to accomplish extraordinary things.

I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.

Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.

Steven Spielberg was my childhood hero.

So that’s the dissenter’s hope: that they are writing not for today but for tomorrow.

Sure, I can get a little bit jealous. The good part about jealousy is that it comes from passion. It’s also the dangerous part and it’s an ugly emotion that hurts.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

In every walk of life, you must have leaders. An education in the spiritual world, in the labor field, in the agricultural field, we must have leaders.

Art is the proper task of life.

Scripture is filled with examples of men and women whom God used late in life, often with great impact – men and women who refused to use old age as an excuse to ignore what God wanted them to do.

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.

Writing is such a strange, utterly mysterious process. First, there was nothing; then, suddenly, there was something. I don’t know where thoughts are born. Where the hell does it come from? I don’t know. I really don’t know.

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.

If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain.

Sporadic thoughts will pop into my head and I’ll have to go write something down, and the next thing you know I’ve written a whole song in an hour.

There have to be reasons that you get up in the morning and you want to live. Why do you want to live? What’s the point? What inspires you? What do you love about the future? If the future does not include being out there among the stars and being a multi-planet species, I find that incredibly depressing.

Man lives for science as well as bread.

I cook, I create, I’m incredibly excited by what I do, I’ve still got a lot to achieve.

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God – but to create him.

To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

I love those who yearn for the impossible.

Labor gives birth to ideas.

When I start to write, I don’t have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come.

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.

I think my biggest musical hero growing up was probably Ian MacKaye. He set a great example for all of us local musicians. Still, to this day, I see him as the best example of a right-on musician.

I believe nothing happens by mistake. You know, the universe has a divine plan. That sounds dramatic.

Whatever fortune has raised to a height, she has raised only to cast it down.

If I get stuck, I look at a book that tells me how someone else did it. I turn the pages, and then I say, ‚Oh, I forgot that bit,‘ then close the book and carry on. Finally, after you’ve figured out how to do it, you read how they did it and find out how dumb your solution is and how much more clever and efficient theirs is!

Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.

When you seek the presence of your creative Spirit and are filled with passion about virtually everything you undertake, you’ll successfully remove the roadblocks from your life and enjoy the active presence of Spirit.

Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could tell, wouldn’t be a man who would curse me out and talk to me rudely.

Hitch your wagon to a star.

Life is either a great adventure or nothing.

My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.

My drive is other people’s success.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.

All I have to say is basically if performing, singing, acting, and dancing is what you want to do, then you just have to do it – no matter where it is.

We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.

My message, especially to young people is to have courage to think differently, courage to invent, to travel the unexplored path, courage to discover the impossible and to conquer the problems and succeed. These are great qualities that they must work towards. This is my message to the young people.

Love is of all passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart and the senses.

I always dreamt of holding the bat and winning games for India. That was my inspiration to take up cricket.

All men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are threatened.

Ideas can be life-changing. Sometimes all you need to open the door is just one more good idea.

My favorite thing in life is writing about life, specifically the parts of life concerning love. Because, as far as I’m concerned, love is absolutely everything.

My dad always said, ‚Champ, the measure of a man is not how often he is knocked down, but how quickly he gets up.‘

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death. He and his are not neglected by the gods.

Because my career is so important, I think I make a lot of – I wouldn’t call them sacrifices, but just concessions for my job. I love what I do, and I want to do it for a long time.

If you are going to write, say, fantasy – stop reading fantasy. You’ve already read too much. Read other things; read westerns, read history, read anything that seems interesting, because if you only read fantasy and then you start to write fantasy, all you’re going to do is recycle the same old stuff and move it around a bit.

It’s a blessing that South Africa has a man like Nelson Mandela.

If we’re going to bring out the best in people, we, too, need to sow seeds of encouragement.

I’m never gonna step away from stand-up. I can’t. That’s what got me where I am, and that’s also my muse. That’s how I stay level-headed. That’s what keeps me going.

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.

I wish I could play bass like Larry Graham or Bootsy Collins. My God, I’d give up just about everything else for that.