In order to be respected, authority has got to be respectable.

Only those who have learned the power of sincere and selfless contribution experience life’s deepest joy: true fulfillment.

Your company’s most valuable asset is how it is known to its customers.

Because you remember Meredith was walking along the highway there and somebody shot him.

The main thing that gives me hope is the media. We have radio, TV, magazines, and books, so we have the possibility of learning from societies that are remote from us, like Somalia. We turn...

I have some good stories yet to tell.

Because there is something helpless and weak and innocent – something like an infant – deep inside us all that really suffers in ways we would never permit an insect to suffer.

Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.

I’m a smart guy, I know the history of this issue and why people care about it.

Whatever help we may want from the international community now or in the future, we want to make sure that this help is tailored to help our people to help themselves.

Whatever I’m reading at the moment seems to influence whatever I’m writing.

The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness.

I was a big comics reader when I was a kid, from about six to fifteen. I collected them, I read them, I even created my own characters in comics.

The expansion of the market creates a need for enhanced and more regular supply, and this in turn impels commercial capital to acquire control of production as well.

If pregnancy were a book they would cut the last two chapters.

Perhaps the greatest challenge has been trying to keep my time to myself and my private life private in order to do my job. Everything that is most mine belongs to everyone now.

True stability results when presumed order and presumed disorder are balanced. A truly stable system expects the unexpected, is prepared to be disrupted, waits to be transformed.

It’s not the events of our lives that shape us, but our beliefs as to what those events mean.

There is no such thing as failure. There are only results.

It is better to err on the side of daring than the side of caution.

Many people have believed that they were Chosen, but none more baldly than the Texans.

I’ve worked very hard in this book to keep the lines of communication open. I don’t want to turn someone away from this information for partisan political reasons.

The advice would be the same for any kind of fiction. Keep writing, and keep sending things out, not to friends and relatives, but to people who have the power to buy. A lot of...

When I’m forced by circumstances to be in a crowd of prisoners, it’s all I can do to refrain from attack.

Strangely enough, the first character in Fried Green Tomatoes was the cafe, and the town. I think a place can be as much a character in a novel as the people.

You know, some of the good part of blog theory was that blogs would be like diaries that the world could read. They would be spontaneous, whatever pops into your mind, as a diary would...

He carried his childhood like a hurt warm bird held to his middle-aged breast.

I like to think of myself as a storyteller.

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.

Moby Dick – that book is so amazing. I just realized that it starts with two characters meeting in bed; that’s how my book begins, too, but I hadn’t noticed the parallel before, two characters...

I think the diversity of authors and readers is expanding, which is wonderful, because it means the type of story being told is also expanding.

Give that to me so I can get out of here.

In America, we no longer have an institutionalized, organized way of calling business to task – of taking them to account for what they’ve done – and this is especially true in the cultural realm.

People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up.

The only limit to your impact is your imagination and commitment.

Move out of your comfort zone. You can only grow if you are willing to feel awkward and uncomfortable when you try something new.

The great growling engine of change – technology.

Federal elections happen every two years in this country. Presidential elections every four years. And four years just isn’t long enough to dismantle all the environmental laws we’ve got in this country.

The southward advance of native African farmers with Central African crops halted in Natal, beyond which Central African crops couldn’t grow – with enormous consequences for the recent history of South Africa.

Intellectual comradeship requires that you think your thoughts through to the place where you can make the complex seem simple, the obscure quite clear.

When people ask for time, it’s always for time to say no. Yes has one more letter in it, but it doesn’t take half as long to say.

Heroic people take risks to themselves to help others. There’s nothing heroic about accepting $5 million to go out and run around chasing a ball, although you may show fortitude or those other qualities while...

I saw many aspects of the country which I needed to see in order that I might know what we need to do.

In most conventional novels, God is not allowed to be nuts. Nor are nuts allowed to be God.

Understand, I had absolutely no interest in writing; I wanted to be a Writer.

Comic books were just the means for me to tell the story.

No matter how nice the company one might be with, however, it is never pleasant to have a rifle pointed at one’s back.

I try to write parts for women that are as complicated and interesting as women actually are.

I don’t see any kind of mirror of power, male power, that is, as a form of liberation. I don’t believe in an eye for an eye. I don’t believe this is truly freedom.

What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul?