Today, writers want to impress other writers.

Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.

When the human race neglects its weaker members, when the family neglects its weakest one – it’s the first blow in a suicidal movement. I see the neglect in cities around the country, in poor white children in West Virginia and Virginia and Kentucky – in the big cities, too, for that matter.

I want you to be concerned about your next door neighbor. Do you know your next door neighbor?

If you want to be a good writer, be the best writer in the world. That’s what I’ve done.

I want to thank God, obviously for the health, for the talent He’s given me, for my family who supports me, for the things that basketball’s taught me on and off the court. For the people that I’ve been able to meet through the game of basketball.

I have a big gay and lesbian following and they’ve been very loyal and kind to me.

I’ve often made revisions at that stage that turned out to be mistakes because I wasn’t really in the rhythm of the story anymore. I see a little bit of writing that doesn’t seem to be doing as much work as it should be doing, and right at the end, I will sort of rev it up. But when I finally read the story again, it seems a bit obtrusive.

The answer to the problem of inequality is for the people who are fortunate enough to either have been gifted or deserved more to do everything they can to make the communities around them as strong as they possibly can.

All writers are going to have to learn more about science, because it’s such an interesting part of their environment.

Being acknowledged for your work is always a great accomplishment, whether it’s people in my city, kids in the street, all the way up to the Grammys.

Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.

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.

Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

I don’t even like showing my stuff to publishers and editors much.

To tax the community for the advantage of a class is not protection: it is plunder.

I’ve known for years that the university underserved the community, because we assumed that university education is for 18- to 22-year-olds, which is a proposition that’s so absurd it is absolutely mind-boggling that anyone ever conceptualized it. Why wouldn’t you take university courses throughout your entire life?

Stay active. Read the Word. Worship with other believers. Continue to give. Keep learning and growing. Your faith will be unleashed!

I’m telling you there is hope. I have seen it, but it does not come from the governments or corporations. It comes from the people.

There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families.

I advocate that every woman be a part of a circle, and a circle that meets at least once a month, or if you can’t do that, once every two months or every four months.

The outpouring of support from millions of people in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti has been impressive.

I’m convinced of this: Good done anywhere is good done everywhere. For a change, start by speaking to people rather than walking by them like they’re stones that don’t matter. As long as you’re breathing, it’s never too late to do some good.

Still and all, why bother? Here’s my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.

All religions and all communities have the same rights, and it is my responsibility to ensure their complete and total protection. My government will not tolerate or accept any discrimination based on caste, creed and religion.

I do not doubt that we would become more useful if we praised God more, and others would join us, for they would see that God has blessed us.

We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty.

Brevity and conciseness are the parents of correction.

The arts don’t exist in isolation.

We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.

Maybe every city has a unique sensibility, but we don’t have names for what they are or haven’t identified them all. We can’t pinpoint exactly what makes each city’s people unique yet.

You create a community with music, not just at concerts but by talking about it with your friends.

Certainly it is valuable to a trained writer to crash in an aircraft which burns. He learns several important things very quickly. Whether they will be of use to him is conditioned by survival. Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer.

Social media is called social media for a reason. It lends itself to sharing rather than horn-tooting.

I have a big following among the biogeeks of this world. Nobody ever puts them in books.

My dad had a church of 90 people when I was born. It was just, over the years it continued to grow.

Writers have to put up with this editor thing; it is ageless and eternal and wrong.

Hate has no place in the house of God.

So while an incredible amount of progress has been made, on this fifth anniversary, I wanted to come here and tell the people of this city directly: My administration is going to stand with you – and fight alongside you – until the job is done. Until New Orleans is all the way back, all the way.

I think many people in my community had very different kinds of mothers: they had mothers who acquiesced in the system of male and white-supremacist domination, and my mother never did. She just could not do it. It just wasn’t in her.

My father used to have an expression. He’d say, ‚Joey, a job is about a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about your dignity. It’s about respect. It’s about your place in your community.‘

Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.

I think tolerance and acceptance and love is something that feeds every community.

The community which has neither poverty nor riches will always have the noblest principles.

The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.

The answer to many of the domestic problems we face is not higher taxes and more spending. It is less waste, more results and greater freedom for the individual American to earn a rightful place in his own community – and for States and localities to address their own needs in their own ways, in the light of their own priorities.

I think your values are always influenced by your family and your community.

Substitute ‚damn‘ every time you’re inclined to write ‚very‘; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

Why is it so hard for people to believe that white people are poor?! I wouldn’t say I lived in a ghetto; I’d say I lived in the ‚hood. The same friends I had back then are the same people on tour with me now.

Easy reading is damn hard writing. But if it’s right, it’s easy. It’s the other way round, too. If it’s slovenly written, then it’s hard to read. It doesn’t give the reader what the careful writer can give the reader.

I know why we’re strong. I know why we have held together; I know why we are united: it’s because there’s always been a growing middle class.

The intensity of the football and how the people live football in Liverpool – it is not a usual.

If you are going to write, say, fantasy – stop reading fantasy. You’ve already read too much. Read other things; read westerns, read history, read anything that seems interesting, because if you only read fantasy and then you start to write fantasy, all you’re going to do is recycle the same old stuff and move it around a bit.

It’s not just human nature to associate in tribes. It’s deeper than that.

I never write about the road. I never write about hotels or anything like that.

What we need is a system of thought – you might even call it a religion – that can bind humans together. A system that would fit the Republic of Chad as well as the United States: a system that would supply our idealistic young people with something to believe in.

Engineering didn’t take to me. And what saved me and kept me in college was I ran into ROTC cadets who were in a fraternity called The Pershing Rifles. And I found my place. I found discipline. I found structure. I found people that were like me and I liked.

Above all, this country is our own. Nobody has to get up in the morning and worry what his neighbors think of him. Being a Jew is no problem here.

I don’t know if it’s changing already with ‚Joanne,‘ but my intention is to bring people together that don’t know each other and that would maybe feel awkward, but somehow be brought together by the music. That’s what I wanted to do. Because that is pure and authentic to my family history and what I stand for.

Information helps you to see that you’re not alone. That there’s somebody in Mississippi and somebody in Tokyo who all have wept, who’ve all longed and lost, who’ve all been happy. So the library helps you to see, not only that you are not alone, but that you’re not really any different from everyone else.