I want to be an honest man and a good writer.

I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.

True friends stab you in the front.

How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.

It is not enough to conquer; one must learn to seduce.

In many ways, I’ve been writing personal stories all my life.

I am an over-achiever, and I want to be known for the good things in my life.

Vanity is great motivation, to be fair.

The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.

Whosoever desires constant success must change his conduct with the times.

I feel like this: Whatever is in your path and in your heart, you need to do.

Someone told me something that stuck with me: ‚You have to envision your life, and then go backwards.‘ I’ve been living by that motto for a while, so I see where I need to be. Now I’m just backtracking and trying to get back up there.

Education is not a problem. Education is an opportunity.

My dad had a church of 90 people when I was born. It was just, over the years it continued to grow.

I’d rather be a victor than a victim.

Whatever has happened in my quest for innovation has been part of my quest for immaculate reality.

It’s a piece of cake until you get to the top. You find you can’t stop playing the game the way you’ve always played it.

Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.

People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come in to the mind of others.

I think your values are always influenced by your family and your community.

It is easier to prevent bad habits than to break them.

I never say I am a guru.

Getting stress out of your life takes more than prayer alone. You must take action to make changes and stop doing whatever is causing the stress. You can learn to calm down in the way you handle things.

Integrity means that you are the same in public as you are in private.

I don’t feel too much pressure. I only see an opportunity.

Do not look for approval except for the consciousness of doing your best.

Honesty is the best policy – when there is money in it.

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.

In the struggle between yourself and the world second the world.

The faults of a superior person are like the sun and moon. They have their faults, and everyone sees them; they change and everyone looks up to them.

I’m not very ambitious at all.

Don’t let schooling interfere with your education.

Writing bores me so.

I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives. I like to see a man live so that his place will be proud of him.

To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached, is not in my nature. I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart.

I try to live what I teach. A lot of things come against us in life, but we should try to find something to be grateful for, and see each day as a gift.

O wretched man, wretched not just because of what you are, but also because you do not know how wretched you are!

Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It’s a physical experience.

To not to have entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.

Give a man health and a course to steer, and he’ll never stop to trouble about whether he’s happy or not.

I’m actually a very honest person, and sometimes I end up like, ‚Man, I said too much.‘ It’s hard for me not to tell the truth when you ask me.

Thinking is a wonderful tool if it’s applied. Thinking, however, can not become the master. Thinking is a very bad master. If you’re dominated by thinking then your life becomes very restricted.

Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.

Do not think of your faults, still less of other’s faults; look for what is good and strong, and try to imitate it. Your faults will drop off, like dead leaves, when their time comes.

Never find fault with the absent.

I’ve been writing since I was really young, so I considered myself a writer for a really long time.

We become wiser by adversity; prosperity destroys our appreciation of the right.

Doing the box set is one of those things where you get to rewrite your own history to some extent. We could take out some of the songs that we felt weren’t as strong as some of the others, so you look better.

There’s an ecstatic side to writing. It’s like jazz. It just has a life.

Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write a sentence.

No one can lie, no one can hide anything, when he looks directly into someone’s eyes.

Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.

That’s the most terrible thing about being an author – standing there at your mother’s funeral, but you don’t switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill. Who was it said – one of the famous lady novelists – ‚unhappy is the family that contains an author‘?

I’m 31 now. I think I’m beginning to understand what life is, what romance is, and what a relationship means.

There’s just some magic in truth and honesty and openness.

I have goals.

Whether you think that you can, or that you can’t, you are usually right.

The self is hateful.

It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you, not by angels or by demons, heaven or hell.

Many a man’s strength is in opposition, and when he faileth, he grows out of use.

A word after a word after a word is power.