Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.

I believed in studying just because I knew education was a privilege. It was the discipline of study, to get into the habit of doing something that you don't want to do.

Wynton Marsalis

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

Abraham Lincoln

When you're a married man, Samivel, you'll understand a good many things as you don't understand now; but whether it's worth while, going through so much, to learn so little, as the charity-boy said when he got to the end of the alphabet, is a matter o taste.

Charles Dickens

Leave this touching and clawing. Let him be to me a spirit. A message, a thought, a sincerity, a glance from him, I want, but not news nor pottage. I can get politics, and chat, and neighborly conveniences from cheaper companions. Should not the society of my friend be to me poetic, pure, universal, and great as nature itself? Ought I to feel that our tie is profane in comparison with yonder bar of cloud that sleeps on the horizon, or that clump of waving grass that divides the brook? Let us not vilify, bur raise it to that standard. That great, defying eye, that scornful beauty of his mien and action, do not pique yourself on reducing, but rather fortify and enhance.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Man's greatness consists in his ability to do and the proper application of his powers to things needed to be done.

Frederick Douglass

I love what I do. I take great pride in what I do. And I can't do something halfway, three-quarters, nine-tenths. If I'm going to do something, I go all the way.

Tom Cruise

I feel like I'm drowning. Every night, I'm carrying home loads of things to read but I'm too exhausted. I keep clipping things and Xeroxing them and planning to read them eventually, but I just end up throwing it all away and feeling guilty.

Ghita Levine

Normally, children learn to gauge rather accurately from the tone of their parent's voice how seriously to take his threats. Of course, they sometimes misjudge and pay the penalty.

Louis Kaplan

He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.

George Orwell

Good-humoured, unaffected girls, will not do for a man who has been used to sensible women. They are two distinct orders of being.

Jane Austen

I was a pretty angry kid, and I got into military history largely as a way to vent my own anger. As I got older it narrowed down to a more specific focus on individual violence. I'm just trying to understand where it came from.

Caleb Carr

Sex, a great and mysterious motive force in human life, has indisputably been a subject of absorbing interest to mankind through the ages.

William J. Brennan, Jr.