There is a soak-the-rich attitude in the air, a feeling that if you have a lot of money you must have got it by some ghastly means. I can quite happily say there was never any family money. All the money we got was mine, just from writing books.

Funny thing is that the poorer people are, the more generous they seem to be.

There’s an inherent danger in letting people think that they have perfected something. When they believe they’ve ‚nailed it,‘ most people tend to sit back and rest on their laurels while countless others will be labouring furiously to better their work!

I don’t want people to think of me as sexy.

A dream doesn’t become reality through magic; it takes sweat, determination and hard work.

The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.

When the water starts boiling it is foolish to turn off the heat.

There’s something which impels us to show our inner souls. The more courageous we are, the more we succeed in explaining what we know.

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

If a man can… make a better mousetrap, the world will make a beaten path to his door.

A record deal doesn’t make you an artist; you make yourself an artist.

Wood burns because it has the proper stuff in it; and a man becomes famous because he has the proper stuff in him.

When I write, I can shake off all my cares.

The higher we are placed, the more humbly we should walk.

I felt unhappy and trapped. If I left baseball, where could I go, what could I do to earn enough money to help my mother and to marry Rachel? The solution to my problem was only days away in the hands of a tough, shrewd, courageous man called Branch Rickey, the president of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.

Part of the issue of achievement is to be able to set realistic goals, but that’s one of the hardest things to do because you don’t always know exactly where you’re going, and you shouldn’t.

Judgements prevent us from seeing the good that lies beyond appearances.

Not everyone can see the truth, but he can be it.

Reform is not pleasant, but grievous; no person can reform themselves without suffering and hard work, how much less a nation.

Desire is the starting point of all achievement, not a hope, not a wish, but a keen pulsating desire which transcends everything.

One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven’t and don’t.

A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties.

I feel like everything we do comes down to how it looks. Even no branding is branding. For example, you had no face or image to put to my music at first. That was branding.

What is the use of writing plays, what is the use of writing anything, if there is not a will which finally moulds chaos itself into a race of gods.

Few people have the imagination for reality.

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

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

I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.

I don’t write with a machine. I write with a pen and a paper, which is what is most comfortable for me.

If a star or studio chief or any other great movie personages find themselves sitting among a lot of nobodies, they get frightened – as if somebody was trying to demote them.

The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents.

For people who may think they know, or have snippets of who I am, you can attack that person. That’s part of being a public figure.

I’ve written a number of books that have to do with the evolution of humans, human intelligence, human emotions.

I do not think that there is any other quality so essential to success of any kind as the quality of perseverance. It overcomes almost everything, even nature.

The rich are those who play to win. The middle class plays not to lose.

Before success comes in any man’s life, he’s sure to meet with much temporary defeat and, perhaps some failures. When defeat overtakes a man, the easiest and the most logical thing to do is to quit. That’s exactly what the majority of men do.

The more successful I become, the more I need a man.

If it’s a penny for your thoughts and you put in your two cents worth, then someone, somewhere is making a penny.

In the book of Gaga, fame is in your heart, fame is there to comfort you, to bring you self-confidence and worth whenever you need it.

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.

Ability hits the mark where presumption overshoots and diffidence falls short.

Anybody can be specific and obvious. That’s always been the easy way. It’s not that it’s so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it’s just that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about.

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

A grown man should always carry cash, right? I don’t know who told me, but someone told me that a long time ago, and the biggest turnoff is when a guy doesn’t have cash on him.

Government always finds a need for whatever money it gets.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.

A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.

Considering their impact, you might expect mosquitoes to get more attention than they do. Sharks kill fewer than a dozen people every year, and in the U.S. they get a week dedicated to them on TV every year.

I want to be part of that long list who have achieved great things with McLaren, won races and championships.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong.

I just think that – when a country needs more income and we do, we’re only taking in 15 percent of GDP, I mean, that – that – when a country needs more income, they should get it from the people that have it.

To have done anything just for money is to have been truly idle.

Once you publish a book, it is out of your control. You cannot dictate how people read it.

An author who speaks about their own books is almost as bad as a mother who speaks about her own children.

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday’s dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

Money is an unavoidable consequence, but it isn’t the reason I write; if it was, I wouldn’t have written any of the YA books, because advances in that field are small compared to what I’d got now for an ‚adult‘ DW.

Honor means that a man is not exceptional; fame, that he is. Fame is something which must be won; honor, only something which must not be lost.