One aspect of appellate judging is we have to give reasons for all of our decisions. And when you sit down and try to write it out, sometimes you find that your first judgment wasn’t the right one.

Leadership is a choice, not a position.

I woke up one day and thought: ‚I want to write a book about the history of my body.‘ I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began.

Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.

I’ve never gone wrong trusting my gut.

If you were to ask me to choose between democratic values and wealth, power, prosperity and fame, I will very easily and without any doubt choose democratic values.

I’ve always written. There’s a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother’s papers were destroyed. I’d written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.

Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me.

Of two evils, choose neither.

The safest course is to do nothing against one’s conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death.

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.

I just wanted to write something about running, but I realized that to write about my running is to write about my writing. It’s a parallel thing in me.

I can have people around a lot more because I’m not always chasing them away so I can work on my novel. My non-novel, I mean.

I didn’t have any agenda or plan when I started writing stuff.

I didn’t want to be a writer, but I became one. And now I have many readers, in many countries. I think that’s a miracle. So I think I have to be humble regarding this ability. I’m proud of it and I enjoy it, and it is strange to say it this way, but I respect it.

You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally.

In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place.

Write injuries in dust, benefits in marble.

‚Lives‘ is one of those books I should really have written when I was younger. It is the classic childhood, adolescence, breakthrough-into-maturity book. Every beginning writer has that material – and after that, you’re not sure what you can do.

For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.

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

Charlotte Bronte was writing about sex. I supposed Jane Austen was, too. Where do you get a hero like Darcy unless you are writing about sex?

Your philosophy determines whether you will go for the disciplines or continue the errors.

It is a fine game to play – the game of politics – and it is well worth waiting for a good hand before really plunging.

I hoped to be able to write a novel which would enable me to live on it while I wrote the next.

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.

If we must not act save on a certainty, we ought not to act on religion, for it is not certain. But how many things we do on an uncertainty, sea voyages, battles!

When I did have some success, it further emboldens you to be like, ‚No, I’m just going to write what I feel I should write.‘

It’s not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewere, would much rather you weren’t doing.

I don’t know how much longer I’ll be around. I’ll probably be writing when the Lord says, ‚Maya, Maya Angelou, it’s time.‘

I write for myself things that I’ve gone through.

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

I am a professional sportswriter, among other things, and I take the games seriously. It is only one of my many powerful addictions, and I don’t mind admitting any of them.

The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

The more extensive a man’s knowledge of what has been done, the greater will be his power of knowing what to do.

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.

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

It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

I am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter.

When I worked on a magazine, I learned that there are many, many writers writing that can’t write at all; and they keep on writing all the cliches and bromides and 1890 plots, and poems about Spring and poems about Love, and poems they think are modern because they are done in slang or staccato style, or written with all the ‚i’s‘ small.

I do sometimes look back at things I’ve written in the past, and think, ‚I just don’t remember being the person who wrote that.‘

To prefer evil to good is not in human nature; and when a man is compelled to choose one of two evils, no one will choose the greater when he might have the less.

It would be an egregious mistake to ever refer to me in the same breath as most of the people I write about.

Next to knowing when to seize an opportunity, the most important thing in life is to know when to forego an advantage.

What we won when all of our people united must not be lost in suspicion and distrust and selfishness and politics. Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as president.

The main problem with writing in verse is, if your fourth line doesn’t come out right, you’ve got to throw four lines away and figure out a whole new way to attack the problem. So the mortality rate is terrific.

Like anything else that happens on its own, the act of writing is beyond currency. Money is great stuff to have, but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of money too much. It constipates the whole process.

The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice.

A President’s hardest task is not to do what is right, but to know what is right.

What matters in the Sun-tzu universe are not positions of strength and power, but situations in which you have options, full of potential force.

I don’t think you ever really know what all you’re doing, so you have to act on faith.

Being flooded with information doesn’t mean we have the right information or that we’re in touch with the right people.

In business, if you realize you’ve made a bad decision, you change it.

Most gods throw dice, but Fate plays chess, and you don’t find out til too late that he’s been playing with two queens all along.

To succeed, jump as quickly at opportunities as you do at conclusions.

If you are the kind of person who is waiting for the ‚right‘ thing to happen, you might wait for a long time. It’s like waiting for all the traffic lights to be green for five miles before starting the trip.

I’ve always appreciated a turn of phrase.

Writing’s just as natural to me as getting up and cooking breakfast.

I don’t think consensus-building politics is what I’m meant to be doing.

We do need women in civic life. We do need women to run for office, to be in political office. We need a feminist to be at the table when decisions are being made so that the right decisions will be made.

The biggest mistake we made as a company was betting too much on HTML5.