Each novel is harder than its predecessor because I must work harder at not repeating myself. However, I enjoy the challenge. This is the greatest job in the world.
It's really important to me to keep growing as a writer, to look for new challenges and be harshly critical of my own work in order to learn and tell better stories.
If your work becomes a source of enjoyment and a challenge, it will never seem like work - it will be fun. If you ever feel that your work is a burden, there is no point carrying on with it.
I learned two basic lessons on Everest. First, just because something has worked in the past does not mean it will work today. Second, different challenges require different mindsets.
If a novelist has created vivid characters, interesting relationships, settings the reader can easily imagine, and intriguing stories, a screenwriter has loads to work with. The challenge comes with deciding what to cut and what to keep.
I want to be challenged, I want to work, and I want to feel that I am not being held back, that there is something in front of me, something more inspiring than... just eating breakfast, you know?
What's important to me is that all of my books are in print - and, in a way, that becomes the challenge, not winning this prize or getting that review. It's that the work is there, and you can walk into many bookshops throughout the world and buy it.
I'm as frustrated with the French, I think, as anyone, but look, there's going to be other challenges and there are going to be other issues. As long as there's a war on terrorism going on, we're all going to have to work together.
I think in national security, the war in Iraq is troublesome and a difficult challenge, but our troops and the military leaders we have are managing that situation, although it continues to be very risky and very dangerous.
The Paradoxical Commandments People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered. Love them anyway. If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives. Do good anyway. If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemi...
The Christian message has a moral challenge. If the message is true, the moral challenge has to be accepted. So God is not a fit object for man’s detached scrutiny. You cannot fix God at the end of a telescope or a microscope and say “How interes...
A new civil rights movement cannot be organized around the relics of the earlier system of control if it is to address meaningfully the racial realities of our time. Any racial justice movement, to be successful, must vigorously challenge the public ...
The mechanism by which spirituality becomes passionate is metaphor. An ineffable God requires metaphor not only to be imagined but to be approached, exhorted, evaded, confronted, struggled with, and loved. Through metaphor, the vividness, intensity, ...
The woman next to you that looks really bad might be going through the toughest challenge ever with her teenage daughter; think about if it were you in her shoes before gossiping about her. The man at the checkout line using change may have lost his ...
Zazu: As the king's brother *you* should have been first in line. Mufasa: Well I was first in line. Until the little hairball was born. Mufasa: That hairball is my son and you're future king. Scar: [Begins walking away] Oh, I shall practice my curtse...
But I think Cybil was my biggest fan. She cut out my articles and hung them in her locker and we were always cracking up how if you wrote the simplest, most obvious thing in the world people thought you were a genius.
Worrying about money is one of the biggest causes of unhappiness, but no amount of money can make you happy unless you change the way you feel about it.
To join or not to join films was the biggest choice I had to make. I'd done two years of biogenetic engineering, was an economics graduate and a gold medalist. I had also been a Bharatanatyam dancer from age five, always won the best actress award in...
We talk a lot on 'Biggest Loser' about how fitness is a natural antidepressant, how it burns off stress. What I like about running is that it gives me time alone. I'm always busy, with people at work, with my kids. I love getting out for a run by mys...
The biggest problem in this country is not corruption. The problem is that there are many qualified people who are not where they are supposed to be because they won’t lick anybody’s ass, or they don’t know which ass to lick or they don’t eve...
Very few managers know how to effectively tap the biggest source of performance improvement available to them: namely, the creativity and knowledge of the people who work for them.
