“I don’t try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.”

You fail only if you stop writing.

You’ve got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down.

There’s no use going to school unless your final destination is the library.

It takes writing a billion bad words before you get to the good ones.

I do a first draft as passionately and as quickly as I can. I believe a story is valid only when it’s immediate and passionate, when it dances out of your subconscious. If you interfere in any way, you destroy it.

I don’t believe in government. I hate politics. I’m against it. And I hope that sometime this fall, we can destroy part of our government, and next year destroy even more of it. The less government, the happier I will be.

Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.

You can’t try to do things; you simply must do them.

There was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves.

I know you’ve heard it a thousand times before. But it’s true – hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don’t love something, then don’t do it.

The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance – the idea that anything is possible.

You’ve been put on the world to love the act of being alive.

An athlete may run ten thousand miles in order to prepare for one hundred yards. Quantity gives experience.

If someone tells you to do something for money, tell them to go to hell.

If you don’t like what you’re doing, then don’t do it.

Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction.

Avoiding the temptation to sin and being patient upon that, is greater than being patient whilst being afflicted with trials.

As far as you can avoid it, do not give grief to anyone. Never inflict your rage on another. If you hope for eternal rest, feel the pain yourself; but don’t hurt others.

Temptations, of course, cannot be avoided, but because we cannot prevent the birds from flying over our heads, there is no need that we should let them nest in our hair.

The problem in this world is to avoid concentration of power – we must have a dispersion of power.

Magnetic lines of force convey a far better and purer idea than the phrase magnetic current or magnetic flood: it avoids the assumption of a current or of two currents and also of fluids or a fluid, yet conveys a full and useful pictorial idea to the mind.

It hurts my head, but it’s fine because it’s something I do every day. You can’t avoid the gymnastics questions.

Rock bottom is a crisis. And everyone wants to avoid crisis. But what ‘crisis’ means literally is ‘to sift’ – like a child who goes to the beach, lifts up the sand, and watches all the sand fall away, hoping that there’s treasure left over. That’s what crisis does.

Every job will demand some sacrifice. The key is to avoid unnecessary sacrifice.