“Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words, and they backhand them over the net. They love words that give them a hard time, provided they are in a context that absorbs their attention.”

Creation is in part merely the business of forgoing the great and small distractions.

Stuart rose from the ditch, climbed into his car, and started up the road that led toward the north…As he peeked ahead into the great land that stretched before him, the way seemed long. But the sky was bright, and he somehow felt he was headed in the right direction.

A despot doesn’t fear eloquent writers preaching freedom- he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold.

The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind.

Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people– people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.

Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.

A writer’s style reveals something of his spirit, his habits, his capacites, his bias…it is the Self escaping into the open.

It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck.

A schoolchild should be taught grammar-for the same reason that a medical student should study anatomy.

We’re born, we live a little while, we die. A spider’s life can’t help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that.

Make the work interesting and the discipline will take care of itself.

Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.

Why did you do all this for me?’ he asked. ‘I don’t deserve it. I’ve never done anything for you.’ ‘You have been my friend,’ replied Charlotte. ‘That in itself is a tremendous thing.

You can dissect a joke just as you can a frog. But it tends to die on you.

I am always humbled by the infite ingenuity of the Lord, who can make a red barn cast a blue shadow.

A right is a responsibility in reverse.

We get so much information during the day that doesn’t really tell us anything.

That was excellent! I mean, it didn’t do anything, but it looked really cool!

I am open to doing anything.

In my opinion I really haven’t done anything yet. I still have a lot to prove. I just want to prove to myself that I can play at the highest level of baseball in the world every day.

It’s always been family first for me. No matter how well my career goes, nobody here will ask anything of me. I’m just another Dunn to them.

Can anything good come of a backward way of thinking like judging someone based on skin color? No way.

Writing is hard work, and if anything’s true about the process, it’s that fact that a good story is hard to find and even trickier to get on paper.

You can’t learn anything from being perfect.