There are days when I wonder why my mom couldn't be here to see this.

My father was a scared man. And he communicated his anxiety to me, so that perhaps more than most writers I wanted to make a practical go of it. And my career was eminently practical. I fastened on to this magazine, the New Yorker, that seemed to me to be the top of its class and I tried to get into it, and I did get into it. It was kind of calculating. Kind of crass.But I framed it to myself as a kind of altruistic ambition. Most jobs in the world were competitive, you had to push someone aside, but writing and art I thought weren't like that. You brought something new into the world without displacing anything else. To entertain people, or to hold out a standard of beauty or to even inform them seemed so self-evidently out of what my father called the rat race. Dog eat dog, in his phrase. He had a despairing picture of the capitalist world, as losers in that system tend to do.

John Updike

It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection.

Edward Sapir

You don't have to go looking for love when it's where you come from.

Werner Erhard

Nothing is so contemptible as the sentiments of the mob.

Seneca (Seneca the Elder)

By common consent gray hairs are a crown of glory the only object of respect that can never excite envy.

George Bancroft

The agent never receipts his bill, puts his hat on and bows himself out. He stays around forever, not only for as long as you can write anything that anyone will buy, but as long as anyone will buy any portion of any right to anything that you ever did write. He just takes ten per cent of your life.

Raymond Chandler

You should never view your challenges as a disadvantage. Instead, it's important for you to understand that your experience facing and overcoming adversity is actually one of your biggest advantages.

Michelle Obama

She had just realized there were two things that prevent us from achieving our dreams: believing them to be impossible or seeing those dreams made possible by some sudden turn of the wheel of fortune, when you least expected it. For at that moment, all our fears suddenly surface: the fear of setting off along a road heading who knows where, the fear of a life full of new challenges, the fear of losing forever everything that is familiar.

Paulo Coelho

We need to keep hope alive and strive to do better.

Kofi Annan

A program is a spell cast over a computer, turning input into error messages.

Anon.

Because I could not stop for death, He kindly stopped for me The carriage held but just ourselves and immortality.

Emily Dickinson

Being a part of success is more important than being personally indispensable.

Pat Riley