Although I still occasionally paint and draw, my life has now been shaped by my writing.

A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.

If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter while you are writing than while you are hanging out with your pals or in any other line of work.

John Brown first swam into my vision in the 1960s when I was a political activist in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement at Chapel Hill, where I went to university.

Like Neanderthals, men prefer to hunt alone or, if in a pack, at the head of it. Women, whether in the field or in a campfire, are collaborative, and when they hunt...they work together.

Lists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves.

Loyalty is weird, it kicks in when you dont expect it and the people who deserve loyalty least seem to get it the most.

For almost anyone who chooses to be a writer, since so very few writers are able to learn a living from their work that is equivalent to the living earned by the average dentist or accountant.

Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.

Let the truth take care of itself, I decided. It's done all right on its own so far.

The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer.

One must not let oneself be misled: they say 'Judge not!' but they send to Hell everything that stands in their way.

Music - that's been my education. There's not a day that goes by that I take it for granted.

The fact is that everyone has ki, which is really little more than a technique of visualization allowing one to utilize the internal energy that we all have and letting it flow through the body.

After we have made our requests known to Him, our language should be, "Thy will be done". I would a thousand times rather that Gods' will should be done than my own.

You could be my son. You even look like me a little bit... Say, who's your mother?

As no scripture is of private interpretation, so is there no feeling in a human heart which exists in that heart alone - which is not, in some form or degree, in every human heart.

If you say "can't" you're restricting what you can do or ever will do.

People come to a company like Abbott sometimes and think, Its so big, I cant make a difference. I think just the opposite. I think everybody can make a difference.

Kids love to look at pictures of themselves.

I've stolen a lot. Let me think about the best thing I've stolen. Stolen a lot of hearts.