The very greatest things - great thoughts, discoveries, inventions - have usually been nurtured in hardship, often pondered over in sorrow, and at length established with difficulty.
I found a great book called 'Slang Through the Ages' by Jonathon Green. It's basically a thesaurus of historical slang, and had lots of great old uses.
Now, of course, the great thing about the solar system as a frontier is that there are no Indians, so you can have all the glory of the myth of the American westward expansion without any of the guilt.
I think the most important technique is to ground everything, to make everything - to make fantasy world grounded and relatable, just great characters.
When you dream, you dialogue with aspects of yourself that normally are not with you in the daytime and you discover that you know a great deal more than you thought you did.
'Forrest Gump' was great, it was fabulous. It lasted much longer than anybody thought, and brought me a degree of attention that no human being on the face of the planet deserves.
I think I have a great deal of self-hatred, a profound feeling of fraudulence, of being detestable and evil. It's only a part of me, but it's there, and it's active.
A sure-fire way to know you're crazy is if more than one person has told you you'd be great on a reality show - and you agree with them.
When I was younger I was obsessed with 'Star 80,' and it's just a great movie - I think I saw it three times in the theater.
I always had a great appreciation for jazz, but I'm a very pedestrian musician. I get by. I like to think that my main instrument is vocabulary.
A great director or leader knows his people, creates a great team, and then makes a great movie that can influence millions more than the readers of his column.
There are plenty of examples of people who have had busy lives out there in the world, trying to do good, and written very well at the same time.
Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.
Man's true nature being lost, everything becomes his nature; as, his true good being lost, everything becomes his good.
Religion is a very personal thing for me. Religion has its good moments and its poor moments.
Take all that is given whether wealth, love or language, nothing comes by mistake and with good digestion all can be turned to health.
Evil is a source of moral intelligence in the sense that we need to learn from our shadow, from our dark side, in order to be good.
A collection of good books, with a soul to it in the shape of a librarian, becomes a vitalized power among the impulses by which the world goes on to improvement.
You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination.
Tis a sort of duty to be rich, that it may be in one's power to do good, riches being another word for power.
Fresh air is good if you do not take too much of it; most of the achievements and pleasures of life are in bad air.
