Author Quotations

The most influential of all educational factors is the conversation in a child's home.

If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.

Love of man for woman - love of woman for man. That's the nature, the meaning, the best of life itself.

If you do not think about your future, you cannot have one.

But let us not too hastily triumph in the shame of Sparta, lest we aggravate our own condemnation.

My job as an author is to tell the story in the best way possible, to make it flow seamlessly and get the reader to keep turning the page.

Stress is nothing more than a socially acceptable form of mental illness.

I was immediately smitten with an attraction to this culture, not in the sense of high culture but of the basic way people behaved towards one another.

That's something I learned in art school. I studied graphic design in Germany, and my professor emphasized the responsibility that designers and illustrators have towards the people they create things for.

Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love.

It's nice to have a catcher who knows my mechanics, too. That way if I get into trouble he can stop it before I get out of control.

Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you're two steps ahead!

Smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics.

Better that you should take the chance of trying something that is close to your heart, you think is what you want to write, and if they do not publish it, put it in your drawer. But maybe another day will come and you will find a place to put that.

If in the last few years you haven't discarded a major opinion or acquired a new one, check your pulse. You may be dead.

An ambassador is an honest man sent abroad to lie and intrigue for the benefit of his country.

The principles we live by, in business and in social life, are the most important part of happiness.

All good is hard. All evil is easy. Dying, losing, cheating, and mediocrity is easy. Stay away from easy.

Whatever we are waiting for - peace of mind, contentment, grace, the inner awareness of simple abundance - it will surely come to us, but only when we are ready to receive it with an open and grateful heart.

Also, it's risky to try to duplicate earlier success. Magician had a certain charm to it, mostly due to my choice of lead characters, that I would be hard put to duplicate.

Individuals, too, who cultivate a variety of skills seem brighter, more energetic and more adaptable than those who know how to do one thing only.

I know that I am a singer and an actor, yet in order to give the public the impression that I am neither one nor the other, but the real man conceived by the author, I have to feel and to think as the man the author had in mind.

From where they stood, they could see the castle.

There cannot be any better cross-section of America and I think the soldiers represent the best we have. Today's soldiers are brighter and smarter, perhaps in a different way, than past generations because they've been brought up in the computer and information age.

It was Orwellian. I completely disappeared, and disappeared the same day. It was by early that evening when the Times story ran. That was an overreaction. All human beings under pressure behave poorly.

To be one's self, and unafraid whether right or wrong, is more admirable than the easy cowardice of surrender to conformity.

A human being must have occupation, of he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world.

The difference between greatness and mediocrity is often how an individual views a mistake.

It was a woman's bedroom, actually a boudoir, and no man belonged in it except by invitation.

Diverting the internal traffic between the Writer as Angel of Light and the Writer as Hustler is that scribbling child in a grown-up body wondering if anybody is listening.

But the basic Taoism that we are concerned with here is simply a particular way of appreciating, learning from, and working with whatever happens in everyday life.

It's all a sham: I have seen, and I know firsthand, indeed from my own pen, how the organized Right has sabotaged not only journalism but also democracy and truth.

We have no right to luxuries while the poor want bread.

And that's what I liked about it, because they are, in the beginning, your little beautiful stock figures, who then make a decision to preserve their futures, but the decision they make isn't completely right, and it destroys their futures.

I am astonished, when I pause to think about it, to discover myself to be an author of humorous novels for children. Or an author at all. I had a childhood much like everyone else's. What went wrong?

Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil is rightwise king born of all England.

We come to love not by finding a perfect person but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.

The road was new to me, as roads always are, going back.

The trick is to be grateful when your mood is high and graceful when it is low.

We'll have to marshal our forces in Washington. It won't be easy. That doesn't mean it can't be done.

There used to be a real me, but I had it surgically removed.

Uneasy lies the head that craves the crown.

Fiction is often most powerful when the author is exploring an issue - and not writing like a know-it-all who has the perfect answer.

Like their personal lives, women's history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others.

Our present time is indeed a criticizing and critical time, hovering between the wish, and the inability to believe. Our complaints are like arrows shot up into the air at no target: and with no purpose they only fall back upon our own heads and destroy ourselves.

Civil rights are more important today than they ever have been in our country. There is so much divisiveness today.

A key goal for an author of history is to persuade his or her readers to forget what they know and to relive the world as it unfolded for characters of the time - with outcomes uncertain.

Remember that you don't choose love; love chooses you. All you really can do is accept it for all its mystery when it comes into your life. Feel the way it fills you to overflowing then reach out and give it away.

Make no judgements where you have no compassion.

I first encountered Bradbury's writing when I was pretty young. He's a great bridge author between young-adult fiction and literature.

A nonfiction author has to bring a platform with him - radio, a TV show or some kind of recognizable vehicle to help launch them. And the agent is really necessary to represent all of the business interests of the author.

You have to lead people gently toward what they already know is right.

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.

The real problem is what to do with the problem-solvers after the problems are solved.

I like Ireland because it means I'm near France.

Each author has his or her own voice. I read each book slowly so I can see the patterns they use to spread out the garden of earthly delights.

Reading should not be presented to children as a chore, a duty. It should be offered as a gift.

Her godmother simply touched her with her wand, and, at the same moment, her clothes were turned into cloth of gold and silver, all decked with jewels.

Next to the love of God, the love of country is the best preventive of crime.

The successful man doesn't use others, other people use the successful man, for above all the success is of service.

Making money is a hobby that will complement any other hobbies you have, beautifully.

A permanent division of labor inevitably creates occupational and class inequality and conflict.

Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that's what makes it so boring.

There was no wind in all that sweep of sky.

The author of the Gospel of Judas wasn't against martyrdom, and he didn't ever insult the martyrs. He said it's one thing to die for God if you have to do that. But it's another thing to say that's what God wants, that this is a glorification of God.

Just because I was almost 62, I did not feel decrepit and felt I wasn't finished being a soldier yet.

All the stories I'll ever need are right here on Main Street.

I doubt I'll ever do another book collaboration; I've been spoiled. Roger and I both happened to move to New Mexico at about the same time, when we each had a family of young kids to raise. Socializing seemed to lead naturally to working together.

The first and most important step toward success is the feeling that we can succeed.

The process of learning requires not only hearing and applying but also forgetting and then remembering again.

I don't know much about him; never heard him say more than nope or yup.

Food is our common ground, a universal experience.

What I loved about 'Summer' was that they were these four bright kids with a wonderful future. In a way, she was the one with the brains, and then you have the beauty queen and the jock and the introvert.

What has made this nation great? Not its heroes but its households.

The ill effects of thought come about when we forget that thought is a function of our consciousness... an ability that we as human beings have. We are the producers of our own thinking.

The communication is in the work and words are no substitute for this.

I'll be damned if I want most folks out there to do unto me what they do unto themselves.

I like acting, alright, and it can be fun sometimes, but the process of it, of not being - not being the author of your own life, I can't take that anymore.

The Goddamn human race deserves itself, and as far as I'm concerned it can have it.

Every life is march from innocence, through temptation, to virtue or vice.

There is one Quality, which has somewhat so heavenly in it; that by so much the more we are possess'd of it, by so much the more we draw nearer to the Great Author of Nature.

Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.

The soul is dyed with the color of its leisure thoughts.

Every author believes that the book which he is placing before the public will 'fill a long-felt want,' and success or failure depends very much on how closely he has been able to gauge the nature of the 'long-felt want.'

Most comic scriptwriters are very bad. The artists are good, but the writers are so bad.

What I find cool about being a banned author is this: I'm writing books that evoke a reaction, books that, if dropped in a lake, go down not with a whimper but a splash.

My dreams were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed - my dearest pleasure when free.

Meticulous planning will enable everything a man does to appear spontaneous.

The best way to make happy money is to make money your hobby and not your god.

Always remember that striving and struggle precede success, even in the dictionary.

There's always going to be comparisons, and that's unavoidable. There are people out there who feel I hit my peak with Magician and have gone downhill since.

I found out that colonels can stay until they drop dead or get a walker and being a critical medical specialty as an Army trained emergency room doctor, I could stay until age 67.

Here is the simple but powerful rule... always give people more than they expect to get.

When men and women are able to respect and accept their differences then love has a chance to blossom.

An ordinary man can surround himself with two thousand books and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy.

I escaped one time. In 1971 I was in the free world for six weeks.

It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.

In the western part of England lived a gentleman of large fortune, whose name was Merton.

Even though it was six o'clock, there was no sense of approaching dawn.

This sunlight linked me through the ages to that past consciousness.