“Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head.”

“The strength of a civilization is not measured by its ability to fight wars, but rather by its ability to prevent them.”

“Charm is the ability to make someone else think that both of you are pretty wonderful.”

“Let all the 'free-will' in the world do all it can with all its strength; it will never give rise to a single instance of ability to avoid being hardened if God does not give the Spirit, or of meriting mercy if it is left to its own strength.”

“The ability to concentrate and to use your time well is everything if you want to succeed in business – or almost anywhere else.”

“If you try to fail, and succeed, which have you done?”

“I’m not going to die because I failed as someone else. I’m going to succeed as myself.”

“To learn to succeed, you must first learn to fail.”

“But where you succeed will never matter so much as where you fail.”

“Making art, any art, you are in some way trying to imitate life, and the ways in which that succeeds or fails is fascinating to me…”