Go out and make your own speeches. People need you. Go on TV. It can be done. After you speak up a few times, people say, "Hey, we got a crazy man in the community," and they'll begin talking to you.

Sometimes you just have to jump out the window and grow wings on the way down.

This is the result of six billion years of evolution. Tonight, we have given the lie to gravity.We have reached for the stars.

We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?

If I was ever a rare fine summer person, that's long ago. Most of us are half-and-half. The August noon in us works to stave off the November chills. We survive by what little Fourth of July wits we've stashed away. But there are times when we're all autumn people.

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time. A lot of the people whose work they’ve taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can’t understand why people read them and why they are taught.

If God treats you well by teaching you a disastrous lesson, you never forget it.