“Adventure is something out of the usual pattern, a point at which you cannot avoid confronting the unknown, so that you have to dig inside yourself to find the courage and resources to deal with what may lie ahead, and to succeed.”

What the history of aviation has brought in the 20th century should inspire us to be inventors and explorers ourselves in the new century.

I’m learning kite surfing. It’s a little surfboard you have on your feet with straps, and you have a big kite like a power glider in the air that pulls you. You don’t need waves to move, and it makes a big spray of water as you go.

Pioneering spirit should continue, not to conquer the planet or space … but rather to improve the quality of life.

Welcome to those who believe in the power of dreams and who would like to join me in my exploration of life.

My life and the life of my family has to do with exploration, with adventure. My grandfather was the first man in the stratosphere, and my father was the first to touch the deepest point in the ocean… For me, adventure and exploration is something in the blood.

Nothing can prevent us from another day and night, and the myth of perpetual flight.

A movie I must have seen 10 times is ‘Jonathan Livingston Seagull.’ It’s an old movie, but still such a beautiful message. If I had only one film I could take on my computer on a desert island, I would take ‘Jonathan Livingston Seagull.’

The pioneering spirit is less about thinking up new ideas, as ridding ourselves of dogmas and habits that hold us captive in thinking.

The way the public sees it is this. If we don’t leave, we are idiots. If we do leave but don’t succeed in our mission, we are incompetent. But if we do succeed, it’s because it was easy and anyone could have done it.

We know that dreams fuel innovation.

This is not the time for partisan bickering. This is not the time for politics as usual. Some of us are Democrats. Some of us are Republicans. Some of us are Independents. Above all, we must be Oklahomans first.

Just charge me with the usual.

A good writer refuses to be socialized. He insists on his own version of things, his own consciousness. And by doing so he draws the reader’s eye from its usual groove into a new way of seeing things.

In vain we shall penetrate more and more deeply the secrets of the structure of the human body, we shall not dupe nature; we shall die as usual.

How much do they be paying you?” he asked mellowly. “The usual salary. A little more than they think I’m worth and a little less than I think I’m worth.

Nature intends that, at fixed periods, men should succeed each other by the instrumentality of death. We shall never outwit Nature; we shall die as usual.

There were the usual types of things that happen, in a production, like logistical bullshit, and this and that and the other. That’s the sort of stuff that happened. But I never felt, in a creative sense, that we were ever veering into a place that I hadn’t signed on for.

And I have exposed myself to art so that my work has something beyond just the usual potter.