Self-help must precede help from others. Even for making certain of help from heaven, one has to help oneself.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

John Cheever

Wise anger is like fire from a flint: there is great ado to get it out and when it does come, it is out again immediately.

Edward Everett Hale

The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own - for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.

Rod Serling, episode The Monster

The most beautiful women in the world were African.

Martin Cruz Smith

Do it now! can affect every phase of your life. It can help you do the things you should do but don't feel like doing. It can keep you from procrastinating when an unpleasant duty faces you. But it can also help you do those things that you want to do. It helps you seize those precious moments that, if lost, may never be retrieved.

Napoleon Hill

Lifting our cup means sharing our life so we can celebrate it. When we truly believe we are called to lay down our lives for our friends, we must dare to take the risk to let others know what we are living.

Henri J.M. Nouwen

If I had my way, if I was lucky enough, if I could be on the brink my entire life - that great sense of expectation and excitement without the disappointment - that would be the perfect state.

Cate Blanchett

On Memorial Day, I don't want to only remember the combatants. There were also those who came out of the trenches as writers and poets, who started preaching peace, men and women who have made this world a kinder place to live.

Eric Burdon

As a politician, you have to deal with someone wanting you to fail every day. I think I prefer being in a situation where generally people are rooting for me, and if they aren't rooting for me, they aren't out there to see my downfall. I respect the people who have the stomach for it.

John Legend

A doctor, like anyone else who has to deal with human beings, each of them unique, cannot be a scientist; he is either, like the surgeon, a craftsman, or, like the physician and the psychologist, an artist.

W. H. Auden

I have several writer friends, but I don't involve them in my work process. I'm more likely to talk about the business of publishing with them.

Jodi Picoult

For the superior morality, of which we hear so much, we too would desire to be thankful: at the same time, it were but blindness to deny that this superior morality is properly rather an inferior criminality, produced not by greater love of Virtue, but by greater perfection of Police; and of that far subtler and stronger Police, called Public Opinion.

Thomas Carlyle