You will always have partial points of view, and you’ll always have the story behind the story that hasn’t come out yet. And any form of journalism you’re involved with is going to be up against a biased viewpoint and partial knowledge.

It is more fitting for a man to laugh at life than to lament over it.

We’re all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing.

If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability.

The way I define ‚intelligent design‘ is that when people started out, we wanted to make sense of the world we lived in, so we created stories about how things worked.

Everything is clearer when you’re in love.

Newspapers are the second hand of history. This hand, however, is usually not only of inferior metal to the other hands, it also seldom works properly.

I am not ashamed to confess that I am ignorant of what I do not know.

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.

Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.

A physician without a knowledge of Astrology has no right to call himself a physician.

It seems the older you get, the more life comes into focus.

It is understanding that gives us an ability to have peace. When we understand the other fellow’s viewpoint, and he understands ours, then we can sit down and work out our differences.

I don’t listen to a lot of new stuff. I just like the old stuff. It’s all quite dramatic and atmospheric. You’d have an entire story in song. I never listen to, like, white music – I couldn’t sing you a Zeppelin or Floyd song.

Read about history, and you become aware that nothing starts with us.

People in Latin America… love America from afar and emulate America in some ways but also hate a lot of things that America does to them.

Much learning does not teach understanding.

I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don’t obey the rules of progression for novels. I don’t think about a particular form: I think more about fiction, let’s say a chunk of fiction.

Our Creator expects His children everywhere to educate themselves.

I used to take my short stories to girls‘ homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?

Money doesn’t make you happy. I now have $50 million but I was just as happy when I had $48 million.

It is the fight alone that pleases us, not the victory.

I have found out in later years that we were very poor, but the glory of America is that we didn’t know it then.

When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it. All elegant passages, all the curious details, all the so-called beautiful writing – if they are not truly relevant to what I am trying to say, then they have to go.

Few people have the imagination for reality.

Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.

Where knowledge ends, religion begins.

I always was a rich person because money’s not related to happiness.

I was brought up differently than the average American child because the average child is brought up expecting to be happy.

We identify in our experience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.

Who is the wisest man? He who neither knows or wishes for anything else than what happens.

The multitude of books is making us ignorant.

Things have never been more like the way they are today in history.

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday life.

The universe is wider than our views of it.

Eventually, it came to this place like, ‚I’d like to direct, but I need to find the story to tell.‘ ‚Man of Tai Chi‘ became the story to tell.

Little things console us because little things afflict us.

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them. During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: ‚I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.‘

I’m not confused. I’m just well mixed.

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

The degree of one’s emotions varies inversely with one’s knowledge of the facts.

I don’t want to get into it, but if you know someone, it doesn’t mean you agree with everything they say or they do.

I’ve watched a lot of people who became famous who completely change and I think it’s because they tend to believe all the hype that’s out there. I don’t think there’s that much hype about me.

Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.

You see, I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across – not to just depict life – or criticize it – but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.

God reigns when we take a liberal view, when a liberal view is presented to us.

The only source of knowledge is experience.

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.

See things from the boy’s point of view.

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.

There’s a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That’s what writers do when they’re good.

I can tell you all kinds of moral tales, but fashion and reality are vaguely different.

When I first went to places where people were suffering from war and persecution, I felt ashamed of my feelings of sadness. I could see more possibilities in my life.

My experience with songwriting is usually so confessional, it’s so drawn from my own life and my own stories.

Libraries raised me.

Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery there never is any recourse to the mention of it.

The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one.

You see something, then it clicks with something else, and it will make a story. But you never know when it’s going to happen.

We should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing: he is at the most time’s carcass.

Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don’t have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere.