“Children have a lesson adults should learn, to not be ashamed of failing, but to get up and try again. Most of us adults are so afraid, so cautious, so 'safe,' and therefore so shrinking and rigid ...”

“But lets not forget the Jew. Anybody that gives even a just criticism of the Jew is instantly labeled anti-Semite. The Jew cries louder than anybody else if anybody criticizes him. You can tell the...”

“People don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book.”

“So early in my life, I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise.”

“You're not to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.”

“You show me a capitalist, and I'll show you a bloodsucker”

“They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked high...”

“The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.”

“If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and...”

“You can start with nothing and still succeed. However, if you don't start you will never succeed.”

“I think, in storytelling, people want to see triumph, and so it's usually nice to start with failure and see someone somehow rise above it. People like to see people try. And they like to see peopl...”

“The starkest rejection letter might be followed by a million-dollar advance. Don't let rejection start to look the same as failure.”

“Coming from Chicago, I like a white Christmas.”

“The British were white, English, and Protestant, just as we were. They had to have some other basis on which to justify independence, and happily they were able to formulate the inalienable truths ...”

“'White Material' is about courage and craziness.”