“Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.”

I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance-but it must be acceptance on his own terms.

God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.

Without involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it.” Stephen Covey “It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.

The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.

Power doesn’t have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.

Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.

I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me?

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.

Power, for the writer….lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.

Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn’t now, I couldn’t give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.

It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.

And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.

Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.

Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.

Music’s free and music’s for everyone to enjoy and express and interpret. It transcends countries and times and decades.

You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.

Liberty itself has appeared intolerable to those nations who have not been accustomed to enjoy it.

I just enjoy life now. I just enjoy every morning I get to wake up.

We can have unity in diversity and diversity in unity. We don’t have to be like one another to enjoy sisterhood.

I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.

The cabbage surpasses all other vegetables. If, at a banquet, you wish to dine a lot and enjoy your dinner, then eat as much cabbage as you wish, seasoned with vinegar, before dinner, and likewise after dinner eat some half-dozen leaves.

The greatest sweetener of human life is Friendship. To raise this to the highest pitch of enjoyment, is a secret which but few discover.