Eliminating what is not wanted or needed is profitable in itself.

Making a wrong decision is understandable. Refusing to search continually for learning is not.

Selecting the right person for the right job is the largest part of coaching.

Quality has to be caused, not controlled.

No one can remember more than three points.

We can spend our whole lives underachieving.

Quality is the result of a carefully constructed cultural environment. It has to be the fabric of the organization, not part of the fabric.

Being convinced one knows the whole story is the surest way to fail.

Very few of the great leaders ever get through their careers without failing, sometimes dramatically.

Slowness to change usually means fear of the new.

The audience only pays attention as long as you know where you are going.

Change should be a friend. It should happen by plan, not by accident.

A rule to live by: I won't use anything I can't explain in five minutes.

The great discoveries are usually obvious.

Successful people breed success.

You don't have to be noisy to be effective.

Eliminating what is not wanted or needed is profitable in itself.

You have to lead people gently toward what they already know is right.

In a true zero-defects approach, there are no unimportant items.

If anything is certain, it is that change is certain. The world we are planning for today will not exist in this form tomorrow.

It is always cheaper to do the job right the first time.

Quality management is needed because nothing is simple anymore, if indeed it ever was.

When you're out of quality, you're out of business.

Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.

All idealists imagine that the causes they serve are fundamentally better than any other causes in the world, and they refuse to believe that if their cause is to flourish at all it requires precisely the same foul-smelling manure that is necessary to all other human undertakings.

In all professions each affects a look and an exterior to appear what he wishes the world to believe that he is. Thus we may say that the whole world is made up of appearances.

I refuse to sit on my laurels.

Turns out, I couldn't catch them - or even get close to them. I realized that sharks are amazing, beautiful animals who have absolutely no interest in checking me out.

No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.

I hate the way market forces try to separate us out in to the appropriate demographic - basically in order to sell us things. We need to find stories that we can enjoy together, not separately.

Perhaps what distinguishes my characters is their courage and spirit and a certain stubbornness which enables them to keep going even when facing a setback. I think this developed organically as I wrote, but also it came out of a desire to portray women as powerful and intelligent forces in the world.

As a young kid, I really wanted to be rich.

I'm more interested in having a place to work out my voice and my body than I am in having furniture.

I love Chekhov. I could go on all day about him.

We have our roots in country, and that's our foundation, but we pull from a lot.

Evil is only good perverted.

There's something called religion, and it was invented a long time ago by people who felt very out of control with their lives, who didn't know... why the sun always rose over the mountains.

A hungry man is not a free man.

I write the story as it comes to me - YA is my natural voice, not a conscious choice.

We do not remember days, we remember moments.

I have a rat inside my skull that runs on a treadmill - pitta-patta pitta-patta pitta-patta. I enjoy the company of other people who experience that pitta-patta in their skulls.

I believe that pluralistic secularism, in the long run, is a more deadly poison than straightforward persecution.

I would like to think that the singer is the butterfly, and the drummer was just the little grub in the ground, working to become a caterpillar.

If you remember the '90s, you weren't there.

Writing the art of communicating thoughts to the mind, through the eye is the great invention of the world.

Destroy the seed of evil, or it will grow up to your ruin.

First concert I ever went to was a group called The Yardbirds. Eric Clapton is the lead guitarist.