Painting fulfills a need to be non-intellectual. There are times when we have to get our brains out in our fingers.

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

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

Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall.

Looking back over a lifetime, you see that love was the answer to everything.

Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things.

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

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.

Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.

There's a book of poetryin the lines of my handsthat no one wants to read

Just to keep the bad dreams at bay, she took a swig out of a bottle that smelled of apples and happy brain-death.

It would cost you a groaning to take off my edge.

Wouldn't it be great if we could look forward to a whole world in which no child will be left behind?

We must do what we think we can't do.

It's my job that if somebody wants to have a discussion about something, I'm certainly sensitive to that, and I'm willing to do it.

I just can't believe it's always somebody else's fault. Sometimes you just have to take a look in the mirror and reflect on what went wrong.

The dove loves when it quarrels; the wolf hates when it flatters.

Managers who extensively plan the future get the timing wrong.

Part of the broader task of Christian scholarship is to help create and sustain a cultural milieu in which the gospel can be heard as an intellectually viable option for thinking men and women.