“You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.”

You are in the country where you make up the rules, the laws. You are both dictator and obedient populace. It is a country nobody has ever explored before. It is up to you to make the maps, to build the cities.

The worst walls are never the ones you find in your way. The worst walls are the ones you put there .

As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.

A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart.

You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose…

The two imperatives can no longer coexist with each other; nor can any society founded on the myth that they can be reconciled hope to survive.

The important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking, it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little.

There are no right answers to wrong questions.

Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.

Success is somebody else’s failure.

I certainly wasn’t happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can’t earn, and can’t keep, and often don’t even recognize at the time; I mean joy.

As a kitten does what all other kittens do, so a child wants to do what other children do, with a wanting that is as powerful as it is mindless. Since we human beings have to learn what we do, we have to start out that way, but human mindfulness begins where that wish to be the same leaves off.

All of us have to learn how to invent our lives , make them up, imagine them.

The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries.

The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.

Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts.

I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me – shapes and ideas so near to me – so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn’t occurred to me to put them down.

Coming down the 18th, your heart’s pounding, and the hair is sticking straight up on your arms – there’s no feeling like it.

We have a big appetite for putting people down but, at the heart of everyone, there’s enough room for all of us to succeed.

My momma didn’t clean up floors so I could be a thug… so I could wear my pants down.

Deep down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, is the only remaining primitive society.

WWE asked me to be in the Hall of Fame, and I turned it down. You know why? They put Pete Rose in the wrestling Hall of Fame. This guy can’t even get into his own Hall of Fame.

If you get knocked down – setbacks in life, like applying for a job if they don’t hire you – keep trying, keep getting up, keep doing it.

Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.