Your attitude is everything. Believe in yourself and trust your material. To be a successful writer, write every single day where you feel like it or not. Never, never give up, and the world will reward you beyond your wildest dreams.

My parents were teachers and they went out of their way to see to it that I had books. We grew up in a home that was full of books. And so I learned to read. I loved to read.

But then, as far as I know, as far as I've studied or heard or picked up, it seems that this type of thing is a curse against mankind.

I think most people when you say slavery tend to see a group of anonymous people pulling cotton sacks in great plantation fields, and that is largely true.

Unless we learn from history, we are destined to repeat it. This is no longer merely an academic exercise, but may contain our worlds fate and our destiny.

You don't spend twenty years of your life in the service and not have a warm, nostalgic feeling left in you. It's a small service, and there's a lot of esprit de corps.

I suppose that it was inevitable that my word-base broadened. I could now for the first time pick up a book and read and now begin to understand what the book was saying. Anyone who has read a great deal can imagine the new world that opened. Let me tell you something: from then until I left that prison, in every free moment I had, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading in my bunk. You couldn’t have gotten me out of my books with a wedge...Months passed without my even thinking about being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life.