Nobody wants to read about the honest lawyer down the street who does real estate loans and wills. If you want to sell books, you have to write about the interesting lawyers - the guys who steal all the money and take off. That's the fun stuff.
One of the greatest investments of our lifetime has been New York City real estate, and investors made the highest returns when they bought stuff during the 1970s and 1980s when people were getting mugged. The lesson is that you make the most money w...
When I'm talking to groups that are all men, we talk about how the masculine role limits them. They often want to talk about how they missed having real fathers, real loving, present fathers, because of the way that they tried to fit the picture of m...
The most distinguishing element of my novels is that I try as hard as I can - within the context of a popular commercial thriller - to make them feel authentic. Drawing on real locations and real events is part of that authenticity.
Only when we are thrust into the deepest and most terrible corner of life, do we see our real friends emerge from the shadows , one by one- shining the light of comfort and hope. Those are the ONLY friends that matter.
You don't start a company because you want to be an entrepreneur or the fame and glory that comes along with it. You become an entrepreneur, and you create a company to solve a real problem. And by real problem, I mean a problem that is going to exis...
The real leaders intend to do definitely that good task for which a pretender has provoked him by saying that it can’t be done, but the good number of pretenders tend to do only that job for which a real leader has cautioned them by showing the thi...
The real leaders intend to do definitely that good task for which a pretender has provoked them by saying that it can’t be done, but the good number of pretenders tend to do only that job for which a real leader has cautioned them by showing the th...
Why should a financial engineer be paid four, four times... to a hundred times more than the, uh... real engineer? A real engineer build bridges, a financial engineer build, build dreams. And when those dream turn out to be nightmares, other people p...
The function of the university is not simply to teach breadwinning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools, or to be a centre of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowle...
I can't even tell you what else I imagined. I can only humiliate myself to such a degree; at a certain point it becomes humorous, and this story is not meant to be humorous. This story is meant to winch your ribs open and tamper with your heart. This...
Like night dreams, stores often use symbolic language, therefore bypassing the ego and persona, and traveling straight to the spirit and soul who listen for the ancient and universal instructions embedded there. Because of this process, stories can t...
Finally I do like best of all stories whose necessity is in the implied recognition that someplace out there there exists an urgency—a chaos—, an insanity, a misrule of some dire sort which can end life as we know it but for the fact that this ve...
Ever two seconds, somewhere in the world, a child dies of starvation. That means every two seconds there is a story where the main character dies. That's a lot of horrible stories. So if my death looks like a sad story to someone else, I hope those p...
Of his first enemy encounter, Gen. Grant said that after his initial fear, "My heart resumed its place." Grant said he suddenly realized his potential enemy he had been "as much afraid of me as I had been of him.
But now that I can see it all as from a lonely hilltop, I know it was the story of a mighty vision given to a man too weak to use it; of a holy tree that should have flourished in a people’s heart with flowers and singing birds, and now is withered...
The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer i...
The story of my recent life.' I like that phrase. It makes more sense than 'the story of my life', because we get so many lives between birth and death. A life to be a child. A life to come of age. A life to wander, to settle, to fall in love, to par...
This is our story to tell. You’d think for all the reading I do, I would have thought about this before, but I haven’t. I’ve never once thought about the interpretative, the story telling aspect of life, of my life. I always felt like I was in ...
Some women get erased a little at a time, some all at once. Some reappear. Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that would have her disappear. She struggles with the forces that would tell her story for her, or write her out of the story,...
Those places where sadness and misery abound are favoured settings for stories of ghosts and apparitions. Calcutta has countless such stories hidden in its darkness, stories that nobody wants to admit they believe but which nevertheless survive in th...
