do you have at least one enemy? Good. Invite him or her over for coffee and ask for an honest opinion about your strengths and weaknesses. You will be forever grateful you did.

Achievements have greater appeal as failures, therefore they are systematically overrated. The media usually reportes only about stars, the unsuccessful are not mentioned. Therfore we end up a distorted perception of the real chances. It is useful to study the unsuccessful. #SurvivorshipBias

Behind each successful author hide 100 unsuccessful, behind each unsuccessful there are 100 that did not find a publisher, behind each of them there 100 who have not yet completed their manuscript .... But in the news only the stars get the whole attention.

Should you ever be sent to war, and you don’t agree with its goals, desert.

There are two kinds of forecasters: those who don’t know, and those who don’t know they don’t know

If 50 million people say something foolish, it is still foolish.

If you spend fifteen minutes in a shopping mall, you will pass more people than our ancestors saw during their entire lifetimes.

The more people do something, the more likely we are willing to follow. But this doesn´t make it automatically right, funny, good... Applause at the concert, laughing at shows, walk over a red traffic light

California is always in my mind.

The absolute base-level thing that you do as a new screenwriter is send out query letters. Literally, you just say, 'Hi, Mr. So-and-So,' and you give them a one-sentence description of one of your scripts. You send it out to a list of people you found on the Internet.

Most African Americans, especially the men and women from my generation, would accept the nationalist gambit that says only European Americans can be racists, which is an interesting gambit.

I'm a plant eater.

I believe with all my heart that the Church of Jesus Christ should be a Church of blurred edges.

But I think the credit has to go to Geddy... he spent a lot of time in the studio with Paul, I think he needed that kind of focus to be in there to be a part of the whole thing, and for the most part he made all the major decisions.

And you find as a writer there are certain spots on the planet where you write better than others, and I believe in that. And New Orleans is one of them.

Occult powers, on the other hand, are much wider-ranging. They involve the ability to change dimensional structures and the evolutionary path of sentient beings.

I think the paparazzi is a necessary evil... and if ya don't like it, and ya don't want to do this, go to Iowa and do some community theatre. It's all about self-promotion, and it's not always the fun part of it.

To the ideal of high consumption and the downgrading of spiritual values corresponds a conception of injustice that centers exclusively on the problem of consumption and equality in consumption cannot be achieved except by violence.

I wish that one of my children will be like the Australian guy from the Discovery Channel show. The crocodile hunter.

The voice so sweet, the words so fair, As some soft chime had stroked the air; And though the sound had parted thence, Still left an echo in the sense.

I love a ghost story. I think they affect me more than other people that are much more skeptical than I am. I think that it's good that I do buy into them to some degree.

When counting on learning from innovation, there are great successes but also failures. The Wright Brothers invented the aircraft and started an amazing process of innovation, where we now have planes that carry 500 passengers. Along the way there were some silly looking vehicles that crashed early on.

It's not the heart that compels conclusions in cases, it's the law.

I don't pick up my work at all. If it's something that's still in progress and I have the chance to make some edits on the material or think about the order, little things like that, I'll keep those stories at hand and go through them. But once it exists as the book, it's locked away in a vault, and I kind of put it behind me.

It takes a childlike heart to feel the promptings of the Spirit, to surrender to those commands, and to obey. That is what it takes to be nourished by the good word of God.

All of my children are ideologically and politically in sync with me, they all have authentic Christian faith. It's something I'm very grateful for.

The American dream is still to own your home.

Now I come to 75 years of age, I think what's most important in life is your conscience. If you told a lie and made other people suffer, I think that's very difficult when you reach this age.

Harsh reality is always better than false hope.

We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem.

We are taking challenges and turning them into opportunities by developing homegrown, local energy production to become independent from foreign sources.

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.