“You have to take what you could get when you're getting started.”

“This is what happens when you get old. You start thinking. Worse, you start telling everybody what you think.”

“you don't have to be great to get started, but you have to get started to be great.”

“An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.”

“When you start getting into the process of writing, then the characters start coming alive. And then they tell you what to write.”

“But when you started dating someone, you could never be sure what you were getting into. You had to give someone a chance to show you who he really was… and believe him when he did.”

“The unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. You get to take yourself oh so very seriously.”

“Life is full of decisions and judgments and guesses, and it gets to the point where you're so accustomed to making them you keep right on making them even when you don't strictly need to. You get into a what if thing, and you start speculating about what you would do if some problem was yours instead of somebody else's. It gets to be a habit. It was a habit Jack Reacher had in spades.”

“Yes, there was an element of abstraction and unreality in misfortune. But when an abstraction starts to kill you, you have to get to work on it.”

“Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.”