Writing becomes beautiful when it becomes specific, concrete.

You don't learn to write by going through a series of preset writing exercises. You learn to write by grappling with a real subject that truly matters to you.

When students write from experience, they can breathe those specifics into their writing- dialect, odd smells, precise names of plants- that can animate even the most tired and tedious text.

Here's the secret of writing: there is no secret.

Use your notebook to breathe in the world around you.

Good writing happens when human beings follow particular steps to take control of their sentences-to make their words do what they want them to do.

The real meaning of a poem is to stop time.

Poems are the 'daredevil' of writing because a poem will say what nobody else wants to say.

Springtimeand I wish I knew you

If you want to find missing children put their photo's on Soda Cans, beer cans and cigarette packs and you'll increase the odds by millions some people are lactose in tolerate.

Not very tall, not very dark but very...very handsome, ’ was his way of describing himself.

It [idolatry] nourishes mans ambition to domineer over his fellow man. Idolatry, therefore, is the source of all social and moral evil in the world.

For we, the people, understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.

The thing about it is, all those races we lost, we won this race together. We won it as a team.

Ninety percent of a shirt that not only was bright purple and green but with a design on it that, if you moved too quickly, might cause a seizure in an unsuspecting onlooker.

If I had to resign every time the Cabinet disagrees with me, I could not last as a Defense Minister one week.

I'm a novelist at heart. How's that? And that's how I make my living, is I write novels.

For a man the whole world is his love. For a woman love is her whole world.

...for the object of education is to teach us to love beauty.