“There is quite enough sorrow and shame and suffering and baseness in real life, and there is no need for meeting it unnecessarily in fiction.”

If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn’t sit for a month.

Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty.

We are the heirs of the ages.

I put myself in the way of things happening, and they happened.

Believe you can and you’re halfway there.

It is not often that a man can make opportunities for himself. But he can put himself in such shape that when or if the opportunities come he is ready.

Do not let selfish men or greedy interests skin your country of its beauty, its riches or its romance.

Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.

Politeness is a sign of dignity not subservience.

No man needs sympathy because he has to work, because he has a burden to carry. Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.

Women should have free access to every field of labor which they care to enter, and when their work is as valuable as that of a man it should be paid as highly.

People ask the difference between a leader and a boss. The leader works in the open, and the boss in covert. The leader leads, and the boss drives.

Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive.

The things that will destroy America are prosperity at any price, peace at any price, safety first instead of duty first and love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life.

Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords.

Complaining about a problem without posing a solution is called whining.

I live mostly within my own mind and what scares me is not knowing what is fact or fiction inside of it.

If what we are doing is not seen by some people as science fiction, it’s probably not transformative enough.

People have to start realizing that money is just a fiction, an idea.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

I didn’t lie! I just created fiction with my mouth!

The day I was born songs were on records, phones were tied down, computers needed rooms and the web was fiction. Change the world. You can.

Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.