“Writers don’t need to be given formulas; they need to be shown possibilities.”

My television fed me visions, but I never created my own until I became a reader.

Time to a writer is like play dough in the hands of a toddler.

I’m not very good at practice. But if you tell yourself you love the hole and love hitting it on the fairway, it’s a big difference.

All writing begins in the sea of experience.

The only way to raise the quality of writing in school is to create, share, and celebrate the specific criteria for that quality with everybody on a regular basis.

I should, many a good day, have blown my brains out, but for the recollection that it would have given pleasure to my mother-in-law.

You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose…

Liberties are not given, they are taken.

When you’re given a platform, and you’re allowed to perform, and someone’s there to heighten you as opposed to dampen you, that’s a nice feeling.

Democracy, like liberty, justice and other social and political rights, is not “given”, it is earned through courage, resolution and sacrifice.

To whom much is given, much is expected. I do believe this. It’s embedded in me.

For those to whom much is given, much is required. It is not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up. There is no substitute for victory.

So let me be clear: I’m proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me.