It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome.

Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.

George Santayana

A politician is a man who understands government and it takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who's been dead for fifteen years.

Harry S Truman

When you sit down to write, write. Don't do anything else except go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off.

Stephen King

The words were on their way, and when they arrived, she would hold them in her hands like clouds, and she would ring them out like the rain.

Markus Zusak

You had been a paper boy to me all these years - two dimensions as a character on the page and two different, but still flat, dimensions as a person. But that night you turned out to be real.

John Green

Always a trade. Always a compromise. Until there wasn't anything left to bargain with, because neither one us had any clue what to do.

Steph Campbell

United Artists wanted to do records with me. I had no idea, what a rare thing that was... to make an album. And they put a guy with me working on songs, and I got busy with films. I just kind of let it slide. Isn't that amazing?

John Astin

When you think about it, the Big Bang's a big like school, isn't it?...Well, I mean to say, one day we'll all leave here and become scientists and bank clerks and driving instructors and hotel managers -- the fabric of society, so to speak. But in the meantime, that fabric, that is to say, us, the , is crowded into one tiny little point where none of the laws of society applies, viz., this school.-Ruprecht

Paul Murray

The three-toed sloth lives a peaceful, vegetarian life in perfect harmony with its environment. A good-natured smile is forever on its lips...I have seen that smile with my own eyes. I am not one given to projecting human traits and emotions onto animals, but many a time during that month in Brazil, looking up at a sloth in repose, I felt I was in the presence of upside-down yogis deep in meditation or hermits deep in prayer, wise beings whose intense imaginative lives were beyond the reach of scientific probing.

Yann Martel

I wanted to be left alone to live my life, so it was very easy for people to pretend that they were me.

Mohsen Makhmalbaf

A man's conscience and his judgment is the same thing; and as the judgment, so also the conscience, may be erroneous.

Thomas Hobbes

Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.

Victor Hugo