The death of dictator Kim Jong-Il has cast all eyes on North Korea, a country without literature or freedom or truth.

Orphans are the only ones who get to choose their fathers, and they love them twice as much.

The next day, she was silent. For breakfast, she murdered an onion and served it raw.

. . . nobody every taught you loyalty . . .

I am a champion standing over the shadow of my former self.

Today, tomorrow," she said. "A day is nothing. A day is just a match you strike after the ten thousand matches before it have gone out.

The urge to create a fictional narrative is a mysterious one, and when an idea comes, the writer's sense of what a story wants to be is only vaguely visible through the penumbra of inspiration.

Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past.

A good story feels both surprising and inevitable, fresh and familiar.

[I]n communism, you'd threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.

But people do things to survive, and then after they survive, they can't live with what they've done.

We give up too soon.

what you respond to in any work of art is the artist's struggle against his or her limitations

The future cannot be determined. I can only be experienced as it is occurring. Life doesn't know what it will be until it notices what it has become.

Your positive impact on the generations to come will be directly related to the ministry you have in that little place called home.

I love the beach. I love the sea. All my life I live within - in front of the sea.

To assume the gospel in one generation is to lose it in the next.

It wasn't through the mind, through thinking, that the miracle that is life on earth or your body were created and are being sustained.

To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.

we should think not only of what the leader does to the group, but also of what the group does to the leader.

I'm having the time of my life. I've never looked forward to going to work so much every day. I'm loving it; it's great. It's what I love to do and I wouldn't want to be doing anything else.