Growing up I had a horrible speech impediment. I stuttered to where I couldn't even talk in class. I couldn't even give one-word answers because I would stutter, which in turn made me mad. I fought a lot and I stayed in trouble a lot. I never had someone come in and say, 'We want to have you see a speech therapist to help you'. I was too poor. People that live on the borderline of poverty do not get charity because it does not go that far down the line. I wish I had someone to help me, but it never happened. I did it myself. I still get stuck on a word sometimes, but I don't let it bother me. When I go home, people say, 'Man, it would take you 10 minutes to say a sentence when you were young, and now you're traveling around the country, speaking to corporations and thousands of people. How...did you do it?'

Was this a betrayal, or was it an act of courage? Perhaps both. Neither one involves forethought: such things take place in an instant, in an eyeblink. This can only be because they have been rehearsed by us already, over and over, in silence and darkness; in such silence, such darkness, that we are ignorant of them ourselves. Blind but sure-footed, we step forward as if into a remembered dance.

Margaret Atwood

This too to remember. If a man writes clearly enough any one can see if he fakes. If he mystifies to avoid a straight statement, which is very different from breaking so-called rules of syntax or grammar to make an efffect which can be obtained in no other way, the writer takes a longer time to be known as a fake and other writers who are afflicted by the same necessity will praise him in their own defense. True mysticism should not be confused with incompetence in writing which seeks to mystify where there is no mystery but is really only the necessity to fake to cover lack of knowledge or the inability to state clearly. Mysticism implies a mystery and there are many mysteries; but incompetence is not one of them; nor is overwritten journalism made literature by the injection of a false epic qulaity. Remember this too: all bad writers are in love with the epic.

Ernest Hemingway

Truth alone will endure, all the rest will be swept away before the tide of time. I must continue to bear testimony to truth even if I am forsaken by all. Mine may today be a voice in the wilderness, but it will be heard when all other voices are silenced, if it is the voice of Truth.

Mahatma Gandhi

The poet's job is to put into words those feelings we all have that are so deep, so important, and yet so difficult to name, to tell the truth in such a beautiful way, that people cannot live without it.

Jane Kenyon

It is not enough that one surrenders oneself. Surrender is to give oneself up to the original cause of one's being. Do not delude yourself by imagining such a source to be some God outside you. One's source is within oneself. Give yourself up to it. That means that you should seek the source and merge in it.

Ramana Maharshi

Certainly I've had the experience of thinking a person was one thing, and finding out they were another.

John Hawkes

There's no such thing as failure - just waiting for success.

John Osborne

Sweet is the scene where genial friendship plays the pleasing game of interchanging praise.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Write it. Shoot it. Publish it. Crochet it, sauté it, whatever. MAKE.

Joss Whedon

I think the one thing this picture shows that's new is the psychological disproportion of the kids' demands on the parents. Parents are often at fault, but the kids have some work to do, too.

James Dean

I cannot trust a man to control others who cannot control himself.

Robert E. Lee

What I wish I had, is that I wish I was a little more Greek, in that I wish I could lose my North American driven attitude and that I could be a little bit more poetic and laissez faire.

Nia Vardalos