I did not win and in fact I was called into the principal's office for a consultation with my parents. But that was the beginning of my literary career.

The only road to the highest stations in this country is that of the law.

And I was lucky enough to have teachers that really, really looked out for me and really encouraged all that. And in rural Louisiana, that was a rare thing back then.

So if you're a robot and you're living on this planet, you can do things that you can't do in real life - things that you wished you could do: like fly; like have a car that flies; like have furniture that is alive.

I've always liked getting away with just a little bit of what you're not supposed to. Like my first book, Billy's Booger, got me in trouble with the principal's office.

I raised frogs every spring in our house from tadpoles and by end of summer our house was overrun with frogs.

The first book I ever wrote was in fourth grade and it was called 'Billy's Booger.' It was an autobiographical piece about a kid who was really bad at math.

You know, I hate to give advice because my life has been so odd that almost nothing that's happened to me can apply.

I have known lots of adults who enjoyed similar enthusiasms as a kid and weren't encouraged and then didn't go anywhere with it and so they're unhappy in their jobs as adults.

I did not win and in fact I was called into the principal's office for a consultation with my parents. But that was the beginning of my literary career.

I just took the idea that King Kong was too big for everything and reversed it and put George in a land of giants, which is basically what every kid goes through anyway - that, you know, the world is made for grownups, for tall people, for the giants.

Almost everything in 'A Day With Wilbur Robinson' has some basis in truth. And yes, my sister did pay me to feed her grapes while she talked to her boyfriend on the phone.

But if you really love to write and you really love to tell stories and you really love to draw, you just have to keep doing it no matter what anybody says.

And they're also very good at math, these super boogers, and so they teach Billy the ways of mathematics.

Their toys are alive and can sometimes come to their aid, or get lost and Olie has to find them. They go to other planets. They go to the ice cream planet.

If you really want to tell stories, do it and don't be dissuaded.

I like stirring things up. I'm on the side of the kids more than I am on the adults. And occasionally I find some adults that have that same mischievous streak, so I don't get in too much trouble.

It was a smile of total reassurance and gave all who saw it a feeling of intense well-being. Not joy, but something akin to a sleepy peace. A sort of not-a-worry-in-the-world sensation.

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.

I started working on trying to sound like June from the very beginning.

The end comes when we no longer talk with ourselves. It is the end of genuine thinking and the beginning of the final loneliness.

Even though the future seems far away, it is actually beginning right now.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

The American Revolution was a beginning, not a consummation.

All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door.

The beginning of 1856 found me teaching in the family of a planter named Bryan, residing in Prince George County, Md., some fifteen or twenty miles from Washington.

I did all the work at the beginning up until the point where I couldn't handle the increasingly heavy art production burden alone. I needed, and got, assistance.

Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

You know, in the beginning when your first payroll comes up and you have to borrow money to meet the payroll, you lose sleep the night before, and you say to yourself real fast, 'Well, maybe I should keep working a couple more years. It's sobering.

I think I realized it was an art form at the beginning, but it took me a really long time before I was able to view what I was performing myself as an art form.

In the beginning I had a real work problem. Every time I had job I had to convince the immigration authorities I was the only man for that job and get a special work permit until I went under contract to MGM.

It's interesting that instead of having to get tighter and more restricted for a collaboration, strangely enough, from the beginning, we've actually been more confident that we could handle this.

No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.