“Sometimes you just have to jump out the window and grow wings on the way down.”

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

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.

Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves.

Anything can happen if you are willing to put in the work and remain open to the possibility. Dreams are realized by effort, determination, passion and staying connected to that sense of who you are.

To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.

Education comes from within; you get it by struggle and effort and thought.

It takes a huge effort to free yourself from memory.

Nations consist of people. And with their effort, a nation can accomplish all it could ever want.

Don’t ever let anybody tell you that your efforts don’t matter or that your voice doesn’t count. Don’t ever believe that you can’t make a difference. You have.

Every effort under compulsion demands a sacrifice of energy. I never paid such a price.

My mother understood human nature better and never chided. She knew that a man cannot be saved from his own foolishness or vice by someone else’s efforts or protests, but only by the use of his own will.