Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.

Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.

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

Desperation is a necessary ingredient to learning anything, or creating anything. Period. If you ain’t desperate at some point, you ain’t interesting.

Changes and progress very rarely are gifts from above. They come out of struggles from below.

Young men and women, your education is ever important – to us, to you, and to God.

I do have motivation. A lot of motivation.

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

Action expresses priorities.

Do you want to know who you are? Don’t ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.

If one dream dies, dream another dream. If you get knocked down, get back up and go again.

God wants to use you to make other people happy! And the happier you make others, the happier you will be because you reap what you sow.

Competition gives me energy. It keeps me focused.

I just have an enthusiasm for life.

To me, if life boils down to one thing, it’s movement. To live is to keep moving.

It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.

Some men see things as they are, and say why. I dream of things that never were, and say why not.

I undertake the same project as Montaigne, but with an aim contrary to his own: for he wrote his Essays only for others, and I write my reveries only for myself.

A man’s worth is no greater than his ambitions.

I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don’t know what you’re doing.

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

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

I’m here to spread a message of hope. Follow your heart. Don’t follow what you’ve been told you’re supposed to do.

I don’t spend my time pontificating about high-concept things; I spend my time solving engineering and manufacturing problems.

It’s so tedious writing cookbooks or writing the recipes because I’ve never been much of a measurer. But to write a book, you have to measure everything.

Success isn’t supposed to happen, no matter how hard you work. There’s no guarantee you’re going to succeed. There’s nothing set in stone.

Housework, if you do it right, will kill you.

There’s no point in starting a business unless you’re going to make a dramatic difference to other people’s lives. So if you’ve got an idea that’s gonna make a big difference to other people’s lives, then just get on and do it.

What this power is I cannot say; all I know is that it exists and it becomes available only when a man is in that state of mind in which he knows exactly what he wants and is fully determined not to quit until he finds it.

You just do what you can and you have as much fun as possible.

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.

A really great talent finds its happiness in execution.

I think you get most of the most interesting work done in fields where people don’t think they’re doing art but are merely practicing a craft and working as good craftsmen. Being literate as a writer is good craft, is knowing your job, is knowing how to use your tools properly and not to damage the tools as you use them.

Never do things others can do and will do if there are things others cannot do or will not do.

The most deeply personal of my works are the non-fiction works, the autobiographical works, because there, I’m talking about myself very directly.

See, winners embrace hard work.

I write for the same reason I breathe – because if I didn’t, I would die.

What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man’s soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.

I don’t get up, get dressed, go out, and think, ‚Okay, I gotta find eight jokes.‘

Not brute force but only persuasion and faith are the kings of this world.

Yeah we all shine on, like the moon, and the stars, and the sun.

I went through every emotion with tryna pursue what I’m doing, you know what I mean? And I think what’s gon‘ separate whoever’s gon go for something, that you ain’t gon‘ quit.

If I can be a leader, I will.

I have the Midas touch, in the way that when I hook up with a project, I feel, not speaking cocky or conceited, but there’s a confidence I have. I learned that from Muhammad Ali; I used to bodyguard him. He taught me about confidence. So when it comes to any job I work, I’m gonna do it good; I’m going to bring it over the top.

He who seeks rest finds boredom. He who seeks work finds rest.

Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.

I shook up the world, I shook up the world.

A man is not finished when he is defeated. He is finished when he quits.

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

Lot of players lose hope because of lack of motivation.

What one has, one ought to use: and whatever he does he should do with all his might.

We like to think about how smart we are. But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it’s all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can’t change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.

Outlook 2003 did create the idea of search folders and the whole Longhorn philosophy. You can see it at work in search folders, where instead of having to drop things into individual folders, and things exist only in one folder, you create these search folders and you have the criteria for the search folder.

Freedom is what everyone wants – to be able to act and live with freedom. But the only way to get to a place of freedom is through discipline.

Learned helplessness is the giving-up reaction, the quitting response that follows from the belief that whatever you do doesn’t matter.

If there was nothing wrong in the world there wouldn’t be anything for us to do.

We all sort of do want incentives for creative people to still exist at a certain level. You know, maybe rock stars shouldn’t make as much; who knows? But you want as much creativity to take place in the future as took place in the past.

Everybody has goals, aspirations or whatever, and everybody has been at a point in their life where nobody believed in them.

No book includes the entire world. It’s limited. And so it doesn’t seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There’s so much other material to write about.

The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.