“Your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person-a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.”

Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks.

I am happy to report that in the war between reality and romance, reality is not the stronger.

Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.

An answer is invariably the parent of a whole family of new questions.

You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway.

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

Books are the best friends you can have; they inform you, and entertain you, and they don’t talk back.

People are felt rather than seen after the first few moments.

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.

Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.

In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

All great and precious things are lonely.

Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.

What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness.

Helping people doesn’t have to be an unsound financial strategy.

By the help of microscopes, there is nothing so small, as to escape our inquiry; hence there is a new visible world discovered to the understanding.

Dear Lord, forgive me for all of the times I’ve compared myself to others. I know that You have hand-picked all of my qualities. Help me to see these things as beautiful reminders of Your great love in creating me as Your daughter. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.

Recognizing poor leadership is a vital skill to help you achieve greatness.

We cannot build our own future without helping others to build theirs.

You are who you are. All you can do in this world is help others to be who they are and better themselves.

You can’t get stuck on what should have happened. That doesn’t help you.

Now we just really need to do the work, which we’re doing, to get contraceptives out to women worldwide.