If you were born with the ability to change someone’s perspective or emotions, never waste that gift. It is one of the most powerful gifts God can give—the ability to influence.

An author who gives a manager or publisher any rights in his work except those immediately and specifically required for its publication or performance is for business purposes an imbecile.

Authenticity is a collection of choices that we have to make every day. It's about the choice to show up and be real. The choice to be honest. The choice to let our true selves be seen.

It was one of the dullest speeches I ever heard. The Agee woman told us for three quarters of an hour how she came to write her beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required.

The only way you can truly get to know an author is through the trail of ink he leaves behind him. The person you think you see is only an empty character: truth is always hidden in fiction.

Every author believes, when his first book is published, that those that acclaim it are his personal friends or impersonal peers, while its revilers can only be envious rogues and nonentities.

My fingers burn behind the keys of my typewriter, the lettering fading with every thoughtful strike. The many words I write I dare not stall; my mind perpetually alert for my magnum opus call.

The Kantian imperative to have the courage to think for oneself has involved a contemptuous disregard for the resources of tradition and an infantile view of authority as inherently oppressive.

I'm of the age and immaturity level that I cannot give you my respect solely because you are older or ranked higher on an imaginary totem pole. I give you my respect because of your actions.

When we are driven by ego and a relentless need to succeed, it’s easy to blindly neglect the relationships, self-care and truth that will create joy and authentic fulfillment in our lives.

what matters is not the enclosure of the work within a harmonious figure, but the centrifugal force produced by it -- a plurality of language as a guarantee of a truth that is not merely partial.

Extravagant sartorial display had a purpose. It created the impression of wealth and power on the opponent and pride in the wearer which has been lost sight of in our nervously egalitarian times.

. . . All artists’ work is autobiographical. Any writer’s work is a map of their psyche. You can really see what their concerns are, what their obsessions are, and what interests them.

Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists.

There is in Albert Camus’ literary craftsmanship a seductive intelligence that could almost make a reader dismiss his philosophical intentions if he had not insisted on making them so clear.