Always listen to yourself. It is better to be wrong than to simply follow convention. If you are wrong, no matter, you have learned something and you will grow stronger. If you are right, you have taken another step toward a fulfilling life.

I watch people get older and lose their intellectual acuity; you lose that sharpness, that cleanness, that brain that you worked so hard on and that you were gifted with and lose the gifts that were given.

If I were king of the world there wouldn't be boat people, there would only be people coming in boats. I would mix us all up so that we were all exactly one shade of each other.

Small can beat big, but you must have a plan.

But I was still alive, and in my book, where there's life, there's hope.

I learned that in each of us there burns a flame of independence that must never be allowed to go out. That as long as it exists within us we cannot be destroyed.

Each of us has been designed for one of two immortal functions, as either a storyteller or as a cross-legged listener to tales of wonder, love, and daring. When we cease to tell or listen, then we no longer exist as a people.