“Once the dust clears you will be standing tall, a champion, a victor. NOTHING will be able to knock you down once you’ve taken the biggest hits this life has to offer, so come on life, BRING IT!”

And secretly, he’d be wise to start practicing the piano. For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change.

Still, I’d thought I’d had a unique look at North Korea, only to discover I was wrong.

Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past.

Where we are from… [s]tories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro.

. . . nobody every taught you loyalty . . .

The darkness inside your head is something your imagination fills with stories that have nothing to do with the real darkness around you.

I know it really sounds cheesy, but I did feel a duty to try to tell the stories of people who couldn’t speak for themselves.

Sometimes in life, things happen that will knock you back. Hell, you may get beaten to your knees but you must never ALLOW this world to knock you down!

The death of dictator Kim Jong-Il has cast all eyes on North Korea, a country without literature or freedom or truth.

But, in North Korea, it’s just the opposite. There’s one story. It’s written by the Kim regime. And 23 million people are conscripted to be secondary characters.

Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years.

For an entire populace, change, growth, and spontaneity were dangerous.

A good story feels both surprising and inevitable, fresh and familiar.

Had she never been hungry enough to eat a flower? Did she not know that you could eat daisies, daylilies, pansies, and marigolds?

That hungry enough, a person could consume the bright faces of violas, even the stems of dandelions and the bitter hips of roses?

Acting upon a personal desire, whispering a hidden longing, revealing your true feelings

My biggest pet peeve, I guess, is other comedians criticizing Larry the Cable Guy.

To bring a healthy child into this world, raise them right and watch them grow is the biggest miracle there is.

Passion makes idiots of the cleverest men, and makes the biggest idiots clever.

The biggest thrill a ballplayer can have is when your son takes after you. That happened when my Bobby was in his championship Little League game.

Advances have fallen, generally, for everything except the biggest potential bestsellers.

One of my biggest personal holdings is Rotana. That company has a very dominant force in the Middle East.

One of my biggest problems this season was with the clutch at the start of the race. I hate to risk the car.

A nation like China has become one of the biggest production fields for exporting cheap labor, which also re-questions our history and past, re-questions human desire, and the human illusions of the past.