“In the day-to-day, farm work is stress relief for me. At the end of the day, I love having this other career – my anti-job – that keeps me in shape and gives me control over a vegetal domain.”

To people who think of themselves as God’s houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it.

Even feigning surprise, pretending it was unexpected and saying a ritual thanks, is surely wiser than just expecting everything so carelessly.

There’s always more to a story than a body can see from the fenceline.

I didn’t study writing in school, I studied biology as an undergraduate and graduate student. So I think that I write fiction in the scientific way. I love invention, obviously; I love creation of character. But I do feel very rooted in the real world, even in the way that I create characters.

Hope is a renewable option: If you run out of it at the end of the day, you get to start over in the morning.

But kids don’t stay with you if you do it right. It’s the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won’t be needed in the long run.

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

One of the very first things I figured out about life…is that it’s better to be a hopeful person than a cynical, grumpy one, because you have to live in the same world either way, and if you’re hopeful, you have more fun.

Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history… Listen being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different though. You could say the view is larger.

I had decided early on that if I couldn’t dress elegant, I’d dress memorable.

He was my father. I own half his genes, and all of his history. Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.

I don’t understand how any good art could fail to be political.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.

Downstream is always someone else’s up.

Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work – that goes on, it adds up.

It’s perhaps not the future I would choose. I still think it’s possible to make a success of both marriage and career even though I didn’t. But it’s not a bad future. And I’m not afraid of it.

Money talks. It starts rumors about careers and complicity and speaks of the tragedies and triumphs of our social lives.

Jadakiss is not no walk in no park. Nas is not no walk in no park. These are dudes that could have ended my career.

I know at the beginning of our careers, my wife and I were gut wrenchingly competitive.

I’ve never really had a TV career. I’ve been a soldier and a climber.

Community colleges are one of Americas great social inventions a gateway to the future for first time students looking for an affordable college education, and for mid-career students looking to get ahead in the workplace.

I look back on my life like everybody does but not just career. I mean I look back on my life as a whole, so I don’t think that I dwell there or anything and in terms of work I hope that there is a lot in front of me.

Whether you are talking about education, career, or service, you are talking about life. And life must really have joy. It’s supposed to be fun.