Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.

If you can't laugh when things go bad--laugh and put on a little carnival--then you're either dead or wishing you were.

By and large... the good's an illusion, little fables folks tell themselves so they can get through their days without screaming too much.

I choose to believe in God because it makes things better.

Homesickness is not always a vague, nostalgic, almost beautiful emotion, although that is somehow the way we always seem to picture it in our mind. It can be a terribly keen blade, not just a sickness in metaphor but in fact as well. It can change the way one looks at the world; the faces one sees in the street look not just indifferent but ugly... perhaps even malignant. Homesickness is a real sickness--the ache of the uprooted plant.

All I ask is that you do as well as you can, and remember that, while to write adverbs is human, to write he said or she said is divine.

Give a man or woman back his self-respect, and in most cases-not all, but most-you also give back that person's ability to think with at least some clarity.