No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.

Be miserable. Or motivate yourself. Whatever has to be done, it’s always your choice.

Being self-made means never making an excuse as to why you can’t take steps toward whatever your goal is.

That some achieve great success, is proof to all that others can achieve it as well.

Among all kinds of Writing, there is none in which Authors are more apt to miscarry than in Works of Humour, as there is none in which they are more ambitious to excel.

The size of your success is measured by the strength of your desire; the size of your dream; and how you handle disappointment along the way.

Do the best you can, and don’t take life too serious.

Where sense is wanting, everything is wanting.

You know, T can stand for anything. T stand for working hard. T stand for loving thy neighbor. T stand for feeding the hungry. T stand for just working, working, working, being happy on the set, you know, lifting everybody’s spirits. T stands for just a nice guy.

The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.

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.

I want to represent… to the kids to draw strength from me. So they can see that everybody goes through something, but you can rise up and do your best. Just try.

There is one thing that gets you out of bed in the morning, and that is discipline. Because your dreams and your goals are not there waking up for you in the morning.

I don’t want to make money; I want to make a difference.

Not what I have, but what I do is my kingdom.

Providence has its appointed hour for everything. We cannot command results, we can only strive.

I treated it like every day was my last day with a basketball.

I always believe that there should come a time when your energy, speed, stamina should combine well with your brains.

Success is counted sweetest by those who never succeed.

I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained.

Do not go gentle into that good night but rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Writing music is just like writing a book.

Get busy living, or get busy dying.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy – which many believe goes hand in hand with it – will be dead as well.

Sometimes people make it seem like you have to have certain prerequisites or a crazy life story in order to be successful in this world. But the truth is you really don’t.

A #2 pencil and a dream can take you anywhere.

My old drama coach used to say, ‚Don’t just do something, stand there.‘ Gary Cooper wasn’t afraid to do nothing.

I’m a writer, not a professional runner. It’s fun and it helps me write. I need powerful concentration.

You can do what you have to do, and sometimes you can do it even better than you think you can.

If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.

I never see what has been done; I only see what remains to be done.

By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.

The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.

I soothe my conscience now with the thought that it is better for hard words to be on paper than that Mummy should carry them in her heart.

Sure, women sportswriters look when they’re in the clubhouse. Read their stories. How else do you explain a capital letter in the middle of a word?

I mean, what would I be doing if I couldn’t write? But that fortunately hasn’t proved to be the case and I can read any day. I still read a lot, and I can write any day, but much more slowly and fewer words.

All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.

Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o’clock in the morning can only produce writing that matches what they do. And that includes me.

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.

Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.

Eradications are special. Zero is a magic number. You either do what it takes to get to zero and you’re glad you did it; or you get close, give up and it goes back to where it was before, in which case you wasted all that credibility, activity, money that could have been applied to other things.

A word after a word after a word is power.

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

The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can’t be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.

You might win some, you might lose some. But you go in, you challenge yourself, you become a better man, a better individual, a better fighter.

We were poor. But my mom never accepted that. She worked hard to become a residential contractor – got her master’s with honors at the University of New Orleans. I used to go to every class with her. Her father was my paternal figure.

Make yourself necessary to somebody.

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

It doesn’t matter which side of the fence you get off on sometimes. What matters most is getting off. You cannot make progress without making decisions.

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

My biggest criticism is how can people be so easily satisfied? Even people with talent.

I began writing at the age of 5, but there was a dark period between the ages of 8 and 16 when I didn’t write. I started again at 16 and have no idea why, but it was suddenly the only thing I wanted to do.

I’d be so bored if I wasn’t going out there, knowing that I could still do it. So, I’m going to work hard to be ready to go, and I still plan on playing for a long time.

Well, I thought the deal was, when you went to work for the government you weren’t supposed to make money!

Winning – that’s the most important to me. It’s as simple as that.

I break ground. I trailblaze.

When I write, I write about my surroundings. Sometimes it’s light, and sometimes it gets very dark.