It took me 40 years to write my first book. When I was a child, I was encouraged to go to school. I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death.

‚They‘ are the people that don’t believe in you, that say that you won’t succeed. We stay away from ‚They.‘

If you believe in what you are doing, then let nothing hold you up in your work. Much of the best work of the world has been done against seeming impossibilities. The thing is to get the work done.

We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.

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!

You’ve got to go out on a limb sometimes because that’s where the fruit is.

George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I’m 100 percent fiction writer… I don’t want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don’t state my political messages to anybody.

So we know that it’s not enough for us to simply encourage more people to study abroad. We also need to make sure that they can actually afford it.

I don’t want no handouts. I want to get it out the mud.

While they were saying among themselves it cannot be done, it was done.

Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial ‚we.‘

Failed plans should not be interpreted as a failed vision. Visions don’t change, they are only refined. Plans rarely stay the same, and are scrapped or adjusted as needed. Be stubborn about the vision, but flexible with your plan.

With patient and firm determination, I am going to press on for jobs. I’m going to press on for equality. I’m going to press on for the sake of our children. I’m going to press on for the sake of all those families who are struggling right now. I don’t have time to feel sorry for myself. I don’t have time to complain. I am going to press on.

I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.

I wasn’t very good in academics, but I could have been if I could have studied well. I was a smart kid.

The training of children is a profession, where we must know how to waste time in order to save it.

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.

To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity.

The world turns aside to let any man pass who knows where he is going.

I like writing. I get cranky when I can’t. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose).

My advice is this. For Christ’s sake, don’t write a book that is suitable for a kid of 12 years old, because the kids who read who are 12 years old are reading books for adults. I read all of the James Bond books when I was about 11, which was approximately the right time to read James Bond books.

I would storm the gates of Hell if Third Marine Air Wing was overhead.

Whether you want to go into music, whether you want to be a lawyer, whether you want to be President of the United States, the bottom line for all of you is that you have got to get your education.

I think that’s why my career is going to be so long: Because I haven’t given people everything.

Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.

Engineering training deals with the exact sciences. That sort of exactness makes for truth and conscience. It might be good for the world if more men had that sort of mental start in life even if they did not pursue the profession.

If I’m the people’s poet, then I ought to be in people’s hands – and, I hope, in their heart.

To go to the field and train and understand when days are less, that’s where experience helps.

It’s the job that’s never started as takes longest to finish.

The resolve of our great nation is being tested. But make no mistake, we will show the world that we will pass the test.

Will power is to the mind like a strong blind man who carries on his shoulders a lame man who can see.

Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally. So I get up early in the morning, 4 o’clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that’s enough. In the afternoon, I run. The next day, the dream will continue.

You can’t die with an unfinished book.

The idea of going to school and getting a job is the most destructive one in your brain.

When I write, I tend to twist my hair. Something for my small mind to do, I guess.

God is not on the side of the big battalions, but on the side of those who shoot best.

You need to overcome the tug of people against you as you reach for high goals.

Education is indoctrination if you’re white – subjugation if you’re black.

I’ve played with IVs before, during and after games. I’ve played with a broken hand, a sprained ankle, a torn shoulder, a fractured tooth, a severed lip, and a knee the size of a softball. I don’t miss 15 games because of a toe injury that everybody knows wasn’t that serious in the first place.

When I say that basically writing is a hard hustle, I don’t mean that it is a bad life, if one can get away with it. It’s the miracle of miracles to make a living by the typer.

I don’t know what drives me to succeed.

No sooner said than done – so acts your man of worth.

When I was a kid, I never did funny things to get attention. I was never a funny person. I was never, like, ‚Oh, wow. I could say this some day on stage.‘

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

We’re going to be OK because of the American people. They have more grit, determination and courage than you can imagine.

No one is ever successful at everything that they do.

My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out.

I was a class clown. At 12, I was definitely clowning. I was making all the jokes. But I was smart, so the teachers didn’t know what to do with me.

If you get knocked down – setbacks in life, like applying for a job if they don’t hire you – keep trying, keep getting up, keep doing it.

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 must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book.

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

The most challenging project I’ve ever done, I think, is every single thing I’ve ever tried to do. It’s never easy.

Boot camp sucks – SEAL training sucks – but you know what? That’s what makes you good.

When a person is going through hell, and she encounters someone who went through hellish hell and survived, then she can say, ‚Mine is not so bad as all that. She came through, and so can I.‘

With Malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds.

When you’re a little kid, you don’t see color, and the fact that my friends were black never crossed my mind. It never became an issue until I was a teenager and started trying to rap.

I don’t focus on the critics. Everyone who is making any difference in any field has critics. As long as I feel like I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing, then I don’t worry about it.

Get up, stand up, Stand up for your rights. Get up, stand up, Don’t give up the fight.

Great teachers emanate out of knowledge, passion and compassion.