I claim Dickens as a mentor. He's my teacher. He's one of my driving forces.

A lion is much more dreadful to him that never saw him, than he is to his keeper who feedeth him every day. A pitched battle is more frightful and scaring to a new-listed soldier, that never took his place in the field before, nor saw the dreadful countenance of an army ready to engage, nor heard the thundering noise of cannon, and volleys of shot, the shouts of armies, and groans of dying men on every side, than it is to an old soldier who has been used to such things. The like we may observe in seamen, who it may be trembled at first, and now can sing in a storm.Scarce any thing is more necessary for weak and timorous believers to meditate on, than the time of their separation. Our hearts will be apt to start and boggle at the first view of death; but it is good to do by them as men use to do by young colts; ride them up to that which they fright at, and make them smell to it, which is the way to cure them. Look, as bread, says one, is more necessary than other food, so the meditation of death is more necessary than many other meditations. Every time we change our habitations, we should realise therein our great change: our souls must shortly leave this, and be lodged for a longer season in another mansion. When we put off our clothes at night, we have a fit occasion to consider, that we must strip nearer one of these days, and put off, not our clothes only, but the body that wears them too.http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/ipb-e/epl-10/web/flavel-pneumatologia07.html

John Flavel, A Treatise of the S

There is no one giant step that does it. It's a lot of little steps.

Peter A. Cohen

Basically, there are two things we know: Everybody has less time, and the general public is demanding better food - better in terms of quality and better in terms of flavor.

Bobby Flay

A painstaking course in qualitative and quantitative analysis by John Wing gave me an appreciation of the need for, and beauty of, accurate measurement.

Paul D. Boyer

Men who do not forgive women their little faults will never enjoy their great virtues.

Kahlil Gibran

Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal.

Robert Louis Stevenson

White people love Wayne Brady, because he makes Bryant Gumbel look like Malcolm X

Bryant Gumbel

I'm on the board of directors for Peace Now, which works tirelessly between the Palestinians and the Israelis to create peace in the Middle East and we've never been closer.

Mandy Patinkin

Men, as well as women, are much oftener led by their hearts than by their understandings.

Lord Chesterfield

Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Community cannot long feed on itself, it can only flourish with the coming of others from beyond: their unknown and undiscovered sisters and brothers.

Howard Thurman

It would be foolish to describe the logistics hub as merely ugly, for it has the horrifying, soulless, immaculate beauty characteristic of many of the workplaces of the modern world.

Alain de Botton