“So far it’s 43 books in 25 years.”

Book tours and research provide a lot of travel – too much, I sometimes think, but we do take vacations.

I know nothing about producing TV drama and any involvement on my part is liable to prove an obstacle to the producers, so I prefer to be a cheerleader and let them get on with it.

Writing is a solitary occupation.

Pride makes a man, it drives him, it is the shield wall around his reputation… Men die, they said, but reputation does not die.

Every day is ordinary, until it isn’t.

We discover that it is all an illusion and nothing is there. Lust is a voyage to nowhere, to an empty land, but some men just love such voyages and never care about the destination. Love is a voyage too, a voyage with no destination except death, but a voyage of bliss.

I do understand that you can look into someone’s eyes,” I heard myself saying, “and suddenly know that life will be impossible without them.

Know that their voice can make your heart miss a beat and that their company is all your happiness can ever desire and that their absence will leave your soul alone, bereft and lost.

Because there could not be peace, not while two tribes shared one land. One tribe must win.

You know what circumcision is, Private?

If you understand everything,’ I said carefully, ‘then there’s no room left for magic. It’s only when you’re lost and frightened and in the dark that you call on the Gods, and they like us to call on them. It makes them feel powerful, and that’s why they like us to live in chaos.

And yes, there’s a simplicity to writing books because you’re not a member of a team, so you make all the decisions yourself instead of deferring to a committee.

The existence of tricks does not imply the absence of magic.

Television is a young person’s medium.

Latin! The language of God! Or perhaps He speaks Hebrew? I suppose that’s more likely and it will make things rather awkward in heaven, won’t it? Will we all have to learn Hebrew?

The only mercy of children is that they grow up, as my son has but then, tragically, they beget more children. We do not learn life’s lessons.

When you’re 20 you can put a ton of old-age prosthetics on and be an old guy, but when you’re 70 you can’t play a 20-year-old.

Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance. The cloud clears as you enter it. I have learned this, but like everyone, I learned it late.

At the time of ‘Words, Words, Words,’ I’m a 19-year-old getting up feeling like he’s entitled to do comedy and tell you what he thinks of the world, so that’s inherently a little bit ridiculous.

One reason golf is such an exasperating game is that a thing we learned is so easily forgotten, and we find ourselves struggling year after year with faults we had discovered and corrected time and again.

Our policy for the last many years has been to deter the Chinese government in Beijing from ever coming into the position where they thought they had enough leverage over the U.S. to cross the Straits of Taiwan.

But once I saw them [Jackson 5 during audition], I rushed out with my video camera to start taping them because I knew that they were something so special, mainly because of the lead singer, nine-year-old Michael Jackson. And it was just so obvious to me that he was a star.

I bought me a guitar about a year ago, learned how to play in a day or so.

When I started Go Daddy, I tried many things – like building networks and selling education – and none of it panned out. I lost millions of dollars the first couple of years. I made a lot of wrong turns, but that’s the process of being successful in business.