“Words. Just little black marks on paper. Just sounds in the empty air. But think of the power they have! They can make you laugh or cry, love or hate, fight or run away. They can heal or hurt. They...”

“Youre thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isnt at all. Failure is a teacher a harsh one, perhaps, but the best. You say you have a desk full of rejected manuscripts? Thats great! E...”

“The trouble with if only is that it doesnt change anything. It keeps the person facing the wrong way backward instead of forward. It wastes time. In the end, if you let it become a habit, it can b...”

“Some criticism, no doubt, is constructive, but too much is a subtle poison.”

“Its the person who likes to pat dogs to whom dogs come for pats.”

“Lets not be too harsh where poets are concerned. They have to live in no-mans-land, halfway between dreams and reality.”

“With the gentle force of their words, the dogged warmth of their embrace, and the assuring touch of souls softly bared, mothers are silently shaping whole societies and authoring entire cultures th...”

“Humans are pattern-seeking story-telling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns, whether they exist or not.”

“Listen, everything is possible in here. You can burn every spinning wheel in the kingdom. You can cut your hair before he ever gets the chance to climb up. It is possible to decline the beanstalk. ...”

“Math is sometimes called the science of patterns.”

“All words are pegs to hang ideas on.”

“A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.”

“No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake....”