“Everybody’s gotta learn, nobody’s born knowing.”

The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box.

Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.

But sometimes we have to make the best of things, and the way we conduct ourselves when the chips are down.

Writing is something you’ll never learn in any university or at any school. It’s something that is within you, and if it isn’t there, nothing can put it there.

There’s no substitute for the love of language, for the beauty of an English sentence. There’s no substitute for struggling, if a struggle is needed, to make an English sentence as beautiful as it should be.

I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand.

I do my best to love everybody.

Characters make their own plot. The dimensions of the characters determine the action of the novel.

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.

Writing is a process of self-discipline you must learn before you can call yourself a writer. There are people who write, but I think they’re quite different from people who must write.

My objectives are very limited. I want to do the best I can with the talent God gave me. I hope to goodness that every novel I do gets better and better, not worse and worse.

Rest assured, as long as I am alive any book purporting to be with my cooperation is a falsehood.

The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.

Sometimes it’s better to bend the law a little in special cases.

Things are always better in the morning.

With him, life was routine; without him, life was unbearable.

I was born a long way from where I belong and I am on my way home.

Every human being was born with an inherent gift, and that gift is their gift to humanity; they are supposed to serve humanity in the area of their gifting.

There are some men in this world who are born to do our unpleasant jobs for us. Your father’s one of them.

Don’t be a pigeon if you were born to be an eagle. Experience God’s altitude for your life.

The biggest pieces of work that we do are vaccines, because those save lives, and also family planning. Because if a woman can space the births of her children, it changes everything for her health and her child’s health.

My mother says I didn’t open my eyes for eight days after I was born, but when I did, the first thing I saw was an engagement ring. I was hooked.

Doth not a man die even in his birth? The breaking of prison is death, and what is our birth, but a breaking of prison?

Your work is not your job. Your job is what they pay you to do; your work is what you were born to do.