If I wish to compose or write or pray or preach well, I must be angry. Then all the blood in my veins is stirred, and my understanding is sharpened.

They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.

Don’t let yesterday use up too much of today.

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.

Look at the sky. We are not alone. The whole universe is friendly to us and conspires only to give the best to those who dream and work.

I feel real good because it’s about representing the young world and how to uplift each other and how to push us to be greater and make sure we don’t fall or get trapped or get in trouble, you know what I mean. Stay focused, you know what I mean.

A lot of football success is in the mind. You must believe you are the best and then make sure that you are.

Patience, persistence and perspiration make an unbeatable combination for success.

I have never changed my message. I preach the Bible, and I preach it with authority.

To keep the business going, you gotta keep it boomin‘.

Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again.

We have one planet in our solar system that’s habitable, and that’s the Earth, and space travel can transform things back here for the better. First of all, by just having people go to space and look back on this fragile planet we live on. People have come back transformed and have done fantastic things.

People need motivation to do anything. I don’t think human beings learn anything without desperation.

Red is such an interesting color to correlate with emotion, because it’s on both ends of the spectrum. On one end you have happiness, falling in love, infatuation with someone, passion, all that. On the other end, you’ve got obsession, jealousy, danger, fear, anger and frustration.

Even when you’re 50, you can make the effort to improve your standards.

I’ve always written songs the same way. You learn different tricks – you learn craft, you learn structure, all that – as you go.

I was always trying – I never wanted to let my fans down; I always wanted them to see me in my art form.

The smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another.

I’m trying to show everybody that I’m a girl, and I’m five foot four, and you can do anything you want, no matter your gender. It’s your world, too!

You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was ‚Crime and Punishment‘. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days… I said, ‚If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.‘

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.

However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.

A true artist is expected to be all that is noble-minded, and this is not altogether a mistake; on the other hand, however, in what a mean way are critics allowed to pounce upon us.

Desire is the essence of a man.

Losers are people who are afraid of losing.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

I think music is something that can, and should, be used to get you into different things because eventually what goes up must come down – we’re not going to be the number one group in the world forever – so you have to have something else to fall back on.

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 enjoy competition. I enjoy challenges. If a challenge is in front of me and it appeals to me, I will go ahead and conquer it.

Look within. Within is the fountain of good, and it will ever bubble up, if thou wilt ever dig.

Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.

A collection is not just one basic idea. It comes from something that is in the air, something you suddenly like and put down on paper and then work out.

Great works are performed not by strength but by perseverance.

My heroes are the ones who survived doing it wrong, who made mistakes, but recovered from them.

I was saving the name of ‚Geisel‘ for the Great American Novel.

To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.

You have to dream before your dreams can come true.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

When you can’t make them see the light, make them feel the heat.

Reading and writing are connected. I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.

None of the records I make are ever a deliberate construction – they’re always an expression of who I am at the time and where I am in my life.

The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond them into the impossible.

We can take a ‚It was hard to get there.‘ But we ain’t taking no loss. We’re going to win.

Those who cannot work with their hearts achieve but a hollow, half-hearted success that breeds bitterness all around.

I have the ’77 Million Paintings‘ running in my studio a lot of the time. Occasionally I’ll look up from what I’m doing and I think, ‚God, I’ve never seen anything like that before!‘ And that’s a real thrill.

There is no innovation and creativity without failure. Period.

Pennies do not come from heaven. They have to be earned here on earth.

Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.

I never – you know also one of the things that would save me for a man my age, it was not that easy to lose that much weight and fall down and look like something draped.

We’re going to have to work. We’re going to have to play well. Nothing will be given to us.

Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.

Failure is nature’s plan to prepare you for great responsibilities.

Most people want to avoid pain, and discipline is usually painful.

Admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it.

In action a great heart is the chief qualification. In work, a great head.

Men do not shape destiny, Destiny produces the man for the hour.

Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn’t a rule about this. But there’s a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

Success is like reaching an important birthday and finding you’re exactly the same.

If you are first you are first. If you are second you are nothing.

Hope is a waking dream.