As quoted in "Dark Lens on America" in The New York Times Magazine (14 January 1990)
“I think if you don't have some obsession in your life, you're dead.”
“But she's wrong about hell. You don't have to wait until you're dead to get there.”
Source: Life As We Knew It
“You don't have any civil liberties if you're dead.”
[CNN, http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0603/26/le.01.html, 2006-03-26, CNN Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, 2006-08-22]
Quoting her mother's statement after her son's birth, in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)
Swimming advice to physician Zhisui Li (1966), quoted in The TIME 100 (13 April 1998) http://www.time.com/time/time100/leaders/profile/mao.html
The Computerworld Smithsonian Awards Program Oral History Interview http://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/sj1.html, Advice for Future Entrepreneurs (20 April 1995)
1990s
Context: I'm convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance. It is so hard. You put so much of your life into this thing. There are such rough moments in time that I think most people give up. I don't blame them. Its really tough and it consumes your life. If you've got a family and you're in the early days of a company, I can't imagine how one could do it. I'm sure its been done but its rough. Its pretty much an eighteen hour day job, seven days a week for awhile. Unless you have a lot of passion about this, you're not going to survive. You're going to give it up. So you've got to have an idea, or a problem or a wrong that you want to right that you're passionate about otherwise you're not going to have the perseverance to stick it through. I think that's half the battle right there.
“Don't surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn't true anymore.”
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
It – How Churches and Leaders Can Get It and Keep It (2008, Zondervan)
