Life is just one damned thing after another.

I’ve been through natural disasters. I lived down in Miami and was down there for Hurricane Andrew which was a Category 5. There were members of my family that thought they were going to die. Everyone was in the bathtub.

Over the years I’ve seen people lose a spouse and then withdraw and lose interest in life, and I believe we need to resist that.

For me life is continuously being hungry. The meaning of life is not simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead, to go up, to achieve, to conquer.

Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.

Some people die at 25 and aren’t buried until 75.

The best thing to hold onto in life is each other.

If I were dropped out of a plane into the ocean and told the nearest land was a thousand miles away, I’d still swim. And I’d despise the one who gave up.

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spent the rest of the day putting the pieces together.

If you try to fight the course, it will beat you.

As you deal with more and more complex systems, it becomes harder and harder to find deep and interesting properties.

I mean… in life… what relationship is easy?

You have to be smart. The easy days are over.

There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?

As a medical doctor, I have known the face of adversity. I have seen much of death and dying, suffering and sorrow. I also remember the plight of students overwhelmed by their studies and of those striving to learn a foreign language. And I recall the fatigue and frustration felt by young parents with children in need.

We never live; we are always in the expectation of living.

You’re going to die. You’re going to be dead. It could be 20 years, it could be tomorrow, anytime. So am I. I mean, we’re just going to be gone. The world’s going to go on without us. All right now. You do your job in the face of that, and how seriously you take yourself you decide for yourself.

My definition of country music is really pretty simple. It’s when someone sings about their life and what they know, from an authentic place.

If you try to protect yourself from pain, it becomes a stone in your heart. But the more you learn to face things, the more likely that stone can become a pearl.

Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair.

Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.

My whole family have all been through a difficult time. My focus is my children, our children.

No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence.

When it’s your time, it is your time.

So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre. All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.

It’s not fun to get out of bed early in the morning. When the alarm goes off, it doesn’t sing you a song: it hits you in the head with a baseball bat. So how do you respond to that? Do you crawl underneath your covers and hide? Or do you get up, get aggressive, and attack the day?

The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.

When times are bad is when the real entrepreneurs emerge.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

In modern life nothing produces such an effect as a good platitude. It makes the whole world kin.

Difficulties mastered are opportunities won.

There ought to be an artistic depot where the artist need only hand in his artwork in order to receive what he asks for. As things are, one must be half a business man, and how can one understand – good heavens! – that’s what I really call troublesome.

Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.

If it’s stress of things that we cannot control, what you have to do is you mitigate that stress as much as possible. You’ve planned, you’ve trained, you’ve done everything you can in your power to mitigate the stress that’s facing you. And then after that, there’s nothing you can do. So, you have to let that one go.

The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.

You just can’t beat the person who never gives up.

I am prepared to resort to anything, to submit to anything, for the sake of the commonwealth.

Physical strength can never permanently withstand the impact of spiritual force.

It is better to live rich than to die rich.

To be renewed is everything. What more could one ask for than to have one’s youth back again?

As long as your body is healthy and under control and death is distant, try to save your soul; when death is immanent what can you do?

Mendacity is a system that we live in. Liquor is one way out an death’s the other.

Show me someone who has done something worthwhile, and I’ll show you someone who has overcome adversity.

The universe is transformation: life is opinion.

My attitude has always been, if you fall flat on your face, at least you’re moving forward. All you have to do is get back up and try again.

Actors search for rejection. If they don’t get it they reject themselves.

The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.

The one charm about marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.

There are three constants in life… change, choice and principles.

As a writer, as a creator, I’m giving you my experiences. But just take what I give you. You ain’t got to pry beyond that.

In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.

I was sure I’d set the world on fire, and it was hard for a young feller like me to realize the truth – that I hadn’t set the world on fire, and I was totally unprepared to handle the consequences if ‚The Big Trail‘ had been a success and launched me as a star.

Writing is challenging work because it’s so easy to get consumed with how it’s going, what’s going to happen to it, who’s going to like or not like it. You want to get all of that stuff out of your head and just let the work flow.

Life is an exciting business, and most exciting when it is lived for others.

Youth is to all the glad season of life; but often only by what it hopes, not by what it attains, or what it escapes.

Wisdom does not show itself so much in precept as in life – in firmness of mind and a mastery of appetite. It teaches us to do as well as to talk; and to make our words and actions all of a color.

After your death you will be what you were before your birth.

I have a feeling that I make a very good friend, and I’m a good mother, and a good sister, and a good citizen. I am involved in life itself – all of it. And I have a lot of energy and a lot of nerve.