What happens is not as important as how you react to what happens.

Women like to sit down with trouble - as if it were knitting.

Nothing in life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the way you take it.

No idea is so antiquated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not someday be antiquated.

There wouldn't be half as much fun in the world if it weren't for children and men, and there ain't a mite of difference between them under the skins.

He knows so little and knows it so fluently.

I waited and worked, and watched the inferior exalted for nearly thirty years; and when recognition came at last, it was too late to alter events, or to make a difference in living.

Nothing is more consuming, or more illogical, than the desire for remembrance.

To teach one's self is to be forced to learn twice.

Doesn't all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?

A tragic irony of life is that we so often achieve success or financial independence after the chief reason for which we sought it has passed away.

Mediocrity would always win by force of numbers, but it would win only more mediocrity.

What happens is not as important as how you react to what happens.

All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.

I haven't much opinion of words. They're apt to set fire to a dry tongue, that's what I say.

It is lovely, when I forget all birthdays, including my own, to find that somebody remembers me.

Women are one of the Almighty's enigmas to prove to men that He knows more than they do.

Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.

The only difference between a rut and a grave are the dimensions.

No life is so hard that you cannot make it easier by the way you take it.

No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.

All change is not growth as all movement is not forward.

The older I grow the more earnestly I feel that the few joys of childhood are the best that life has to give.

Idealism, that gaudy coloring matter of passion, fades when it is brought beneath the trenchant white light of knowledge. Ideals, like mountains, are best at a distance.

A good novel cannot be too long nor a bad novel too short.

It's important to give it all you have while you have the chance.

Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world.

I believe that if you want to fight inequality you have to do it starting at infancy.

My dad's from Zimbabwe, and my mom is Danish, Irish, and Norwegian, so I have influences from a lot of different places.

Never trust anyone who doesn't drink coffee.

The fact that we elected Obama was a sign that the black struggle inherent in the blues and so much of the music I have loved can triumph.

Corporate responsibility extends not only to the customers, the resources and the workers of the present, but also to those of the future.

I'm apolitical. Where all that Conservative business came along from, I don't know.

My least favorite subject? Uh... I didn't have a least favorite subject because, I mean, high school is so much fun.

Emancipation, to be of any value to the slave, must be the free, voluntary act of the master, performed from a conviction of its propriety.

I did not see myself as a leading lady. I thought I was really funny-looking and I would never be the lead, and I certainly would never do film or television. I wanted to do theater. I wanted to be the grand dame of the American stage.

The blues are the roots and the other musics are the fruits. Its better keeping the roots alive because it means better fruits from now on. The blues are the roots of all American music. As long as American music survives so will the blues.

I love working with an orchestra, but there are many ways to make music.

I just happen to believe that people are not stupid. And the way I will come at it is to educate people, help people to actually understand that it is that progressive movement that is causing them the problems.

You've got to put interesting people around you; you've got to work with people who are gonna inspire you to take the songs you've written into a completely different direction, because there's nothing more boring than going to the studio and predictably knowing what is going to happen.

I voted for Barack because he was black. 'Cuz that's why other folks vote for other people - because they look like them... That's American politics, pure and simple.

You can tax the rich all you want. The problem is there aren't enough of the rich.

The president and I sat down in the Oval Office, and he expressed very clearly that what he wants from me is my best professional military advice.

Ownership is a sine qua non of sustainable development.

To live is to feel oneself lost.

People of mediocre ability sometimes achieve outstanding success because they don't know when to quit. Most men succeed because they are determined to.

Sexy ain't guys like Churchill and Lincoln.

Conscience. That stuff can drive you nuts.

To my mind, 'Dear Brutus' stands halfway between Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' and Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's 'Into the Woods'. Like them, it is a play about enchantment and disillusion, dreams and reality.