"Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success."

"A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride."

"Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn."

"Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see."

"All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children."

"Once the cry and the cause of a generation of progressives to make America safer, fairer and cleaner, 'regulation' is now a dirty word in our politics. Even Democrats are quick to talk about cutting regulations Republicans hate them with - how to put it? - evangelical fervor."

"Every time there's a revolution, it comes from somebody reading a book about revolution. David Walker wrote a book and Nat Turner did his thing."

"When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading."