“I feel that’s the only way to succeed – by concentrating on something in particular. Once you know what you’ve got to do you will succeed, you will succeed.”

I can understand how evolution says, “don’t believe in God”, but I’ve never had this problem.

My parents always encouraged me and I had a good home life. We were always taught to respect things and other people. It’s so different today, because children are just not taught the right way.

I don’t concentrate on things I can’t do. I do what I can do.

You’ve got to stick at a thing, a particular thing, until you succeed.

I always felt free when I ran. I suppose that’s what was good about it.

No way did I ever think I was going to win the 100m.

I realized from a very early age that God gave me a gift, and that gift was to run, and I wanted to use it to the best of my ability.

My salvation was a free gift. I didn’t have to work for it and it’s better than any gold medal that I’ve ever won.

Everything I did that required effort, I opened my mouth. Even to catch a ball, I opened my mouth.

I feel like myself, strong and weak at once – allowed, at least for a little while, to be both.

Once in a while I catch myself wondering whether I would have found the courage to write if I had not started to write when I was too young to know what was good for me.

My mother once told me that we can’t survive alone,but even if we could, we wouldn’t want to. Without a faction, we have no purpose and no reason to live.

It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone.

There is a story of an Oxford student who once remarked, “I despise all Americans, but have never met one I didn’t like.”

Towards midnight the rain ceased and the clouds drifted away, so that the sky was scattered once more with the incredible lamps of stars.

Once an interesting idea or theme occurs to me then I would want to write a poem about it. The rest, frankly, is not difficult.

One reason patients are reluctant to work in a therapy group is they fear that things will go too far, that the powerful therapist or the collective group might coerce them to lose control–to say or think or feel things that will be catastrophic.