If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody's mercy, then you will probably write melodrama.

My father was often angry when I was most like him.

It is best to act with confidence, no matter how little right you have to it.

People change and forget to tell each other.

Truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels.

I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashion.

You lose your manners when you are poor.

If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

God forgives those who invent what they need.

It is a mark of many famous people that they cannot part with their brightest hour.

If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody's mercy, then you will probably write melodrama.

Things start out as hopes and end up as habits.

I like people who refuse to speak until they are ready to speak.

Lonely people, in talking to each other, can make each other lonelier.

Since when do we have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.

We are a people who do not want to keep much of the past in our heads. It is considered unhealthy in America to remember mistakes, neurotic to think about them, psychotic to dwell on them.

Success isn't everything but it makes a man stand straight.

Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view.

Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.

There are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. And other people who stand around and watch them eat.

Failure in the theater is more dramatic and uglier than any other form of writing. It costs so much, you feel so guilty.

They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Unjust. How many times I've used that word, scolded myself with it. All I mean by it now is that I don't have the final courage to say that I refuse to preside over violations against myself, and to hell with justice.

It is not good to see people who have been pretending strength all their lives lose it even for a minute.

Belief is a moral act for which the believer is to be held responsible.

What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth.

Drinking makes uninteresting people matter less and late at night matter not at all.

Lonely people, in talking to each other can make each other lonelier.

I think people always believe what they want to believe, don't you?

Rebels seldom make good revolutionaries, because organized action, even union with other people, is not possible for them.

A theme is always necessary, a plain, simple, unadorned theme to confuse the ignorant.

From the beginning, the series has been story driven - I began with a story idea - but research feeds it.

I don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done.

Since the beginning, I always loved the game. When you grow up in Montreal, one day you want to be a professional hockey player. When I was six or seven, I knew that was what I wanted.

Before beginning, plan carefully.

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.

The people who voted for President Obama are just beginning to wake up to exactly what they brought in. The 'change' they envisioned is not the 'change' they have gotten.

Religion has caused more harm than any other idea since the beginning of time. There's nothing good I can say about it. People use it as a crutch.

And that's how I start myself. I usually go back a couple of pages, maybe to the beginning of the chapter, and I start reading. And as I'm reading, I'm tweaking - putting in a different word, changing the syntax, putting that clause over there, you know that sort of thing.

In the beginning it was all black and white.

A palindrome is a word or pattern that instead of developing in different directions it folds in on itself so that the beginning and end mirror each other, that they are the same.

Learning is the beginning of wealth. Learning is the beginning of health. Learning is the beginning of spirituality. Searching and learning is where the miracle process all begins.

At the beginning of 1955 only about 60 percent of American homes had TVs.

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Most musicians count at the beginning, and never count and talk to their musicians after that. They only talk to them at the end of the song. But I would count with them and talk.

What you really remember at the beginning was that you have to throw a budget together. We made some terrible mistakes at the beginning in my own budget that took us at least a year to catch up on.

There is a spirit and a need and a man at the beginning of every great human advance. Every one of these must be right for that particular moment of history, or nothing happens.

I am pleased to see that information campaigns, such as the America's WETLAND effort, are getting the message out, and people are beginning to realize that wetlands loss in Louisiana affects us all.