I have spent many, many hours reading J.K. Rowling's work. I am a known 'Harry Potter' fan.

You don’t learn about yourself by being alone, you learn about yourself from other people.

If there's a single lesson that life teaches us, it's that wishing doesn't make it so.

You didn’t get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.

He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.

The danger would be going back, or staying still. The only way out was through. The past was ruins, but the present was still in play.

I have no doubt there are magician psychopaths, and magician serial killers. I doubt Brakebills admissions is very good at screening for those.

That was the thing about the world: it wasn't that things were harder than you thought they were going to be, it was that they were hard in ways that you didn't expect.

It's time to live with what we have and mourn what we lost.

By now he had learned enough to know that when he was getting annoyed at somebody else, it was usually because there was something that he himself should be doing, and he wasn't doing it.

Don't take anyone's writing advice too seriously.

Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear so don't look and they'll stay farther away than you expect they would.

The culture stays alive, but certain parts of it die or fail, and that's very interesting to me.

I'm a busy guy but I set aside quiet time every morning and every evening to keep my equilibrium centered on my own path. I don't like being swayed by anything that might be negative or damaging.

When people begin to ignore human dignity, it will not be long before they begin to ignore human rights.

I went to University of Illinois. Big school. 35,000 students. 800 black... I was the only black in every class. Hard to be absent.

The creature called man has a strange history. He is not of one piece, nor was he born of a single moment in time. His elementary substance is stardust almost as old as the universe.

I must say that part of our national wealth is not only the nation's people but those people who lead them.

And of course coming from Massachusetts, Rocky Marciano was my favorite.

The main thing is not to be dead.

The bass and drums are the engine, and the key to good bass playing is it's not what you play, it's what you DON'T play that counts. You leave the spaces, they're more important than anything.