Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.

Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.

Education is all a matter of building bridges.

I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.

Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.

Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.

If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy.

There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.

I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life.

The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.

America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.

By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication.

Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.

There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.

When I discover who I am, I'll be free.

I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.

Hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.

I am an invisible man... I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

I am an invisible man...I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

I assign myself no rank or any limit, and such an attitude is very much against the trend of the times. But my world has become one of infinite possibilities.

Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.

When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.

That... is how the world moves Not like an arrow but a boomerang

The clock ticked with empty urgency as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.

It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.

The world is just as concrete ornery vile and sublimely wonderful as before only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.

Life is to be lived not controlled and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.

Good fiction is made of that which is real and reality is difficult to come by.

The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.

Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.

As a nation we should commit ourselves not only to the fight against terrorism, but to economic justice, defeat of the AIDS epidemic and vestiges of discriminatory policies of all kinds.

It wasn't my plan to create such a record. All I did was put in the effort to win every match I played and it went on for weeks, months and years until my defeat to Ross Norman in Toulouse in 1986.

The 'morality of compromise' sounds contradictory. Compromise is usually a sign of weakness, or an admission of defeat. Strong men don't compromise, it is said, and principles should never be compromised.

The real peril of war lies not in military defeat. It lies in war itself, whether we win or lose.

If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.

I'm a political scientist and I study these things, and I know that economic problems, with the rising unemployment and inflation and low productivity and so forth, were a factor in that election, in that defeat of President Carter.

Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.

You don't have to fear defeat if you believe it may reveal powers that you didn't know you possessed.

Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure... than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.

A reformer is one who sets forth cheerfully toward sure defeat.

Domestic policy can only defeat us; foreign policy can kill us.

Life can't defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death.

I tried to contribute to the defeat of the Soviets. If I contributed 1%, it is 1% of something enormous.

In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory.

Terrorism is a big danger to Pakistan's independence. We will fight this danger for the sake of independence of Pakistan and will defeat it at all levels.

Yet, history has shown that if material force can defeat some ideologies it can no longer obliterate a civilization without destabilizing the whole planet.