The first obligation of the writer is to be interesting. To be interesting; not to change the world.

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.

Like an ox-cart driver in monsoon season or the skipper of a grounded ship, one must sometimes go forward by going back.

In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity.

More history is made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills and proclamations.

The story of your life is not your life; it's your story.

Is man a savage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile Manners? Or is savagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse?

Those rituals of getting ready to write produce a kind of trance state.

Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.

History - an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant

Nothing is loathsomer than the self-loathing of a self one loathes.

Mapmaker mapmakermake me a mapone to one scale, without a single gap.Map every rock, every thought, every treeand erase all the territory.

You must always think big while you start small.

True wisdomis not borrowed knowledgeit must be basedon my own experience.That which I learn from othersis memory, not wisdom

One of the landmines that church planters never dodge is the landmineof leadership development. I will never forget the day when I realizedthat there are no such things as 'ready-made leaders'.

Even when bad things happen you have to try to use those bad things in a positive manner and really just take the positive out of it.

To tell an adult exactly what steps to take towards his salvation was apt to weaken him. It deprived him of his inalienable right to trial and error which was tonic to the character.

I had very little involvement with 'TinTin'. Very little involvement. So I can't really elaborate on that either.

Troubles are a blessing that force you to change, to believe.

You must pass your days in song. Let your whole life be a song.