I can't imagine why everybody is always so keen for authors to talk about writing. I should have thought it was an author's business to write, not talk.
An aimless life is always a troubled life. Every individual should have an aim. But do not forget that the quality of your aim will depend the quality of your life. Your aim should be high and wide, generous and disinterested; this will make your life precious to yourself and to others. Whatever your ideal, it cannot be perfectly realized unless you have realized perfection in yourself.
Now, as a nation, we don't promise equal outcomes, but we were founded on the idea everybody should have an equal opportunity to succeed. No matter who you are, what you look like, where you come from, you can make it. That's an essential promise of America. Where you start should not determine where you end up.
I've never said that troops should be withdrawn. What I've said is, is that we've got to make sure that we secure and execute the rebuilding and reconstruction process effectively and properly, and I don't think we should have an artificial deadline when to do that.
Awards are not something that I measure my work by. I've been so fortunate and I've gotten to do such terrific things that it seems petty to look back and say, 'Oh, I should have gotten that prize.' I've been so blessed, it's hard to look back and think anything but that, so I have no disappointments.
No woman should have a memory. Memory in a woman is the beginning of dowdiness. One can always tell from a woman's bonnet whether she has got a memory or not.
In another situation, and in an active station in life, I should have been keenly occupied, and the founding of an order would have never come into my head.
I had to be a grown-up when I should have been a little boy, and now that I'm a grown-up my little-boyness has exploded out of me. I've lived my life backwards.
Every human should have the idea of taking care of the environment, of nature, of water. So using too much or wasting water should have some kind of feeling or sense of concern. Some sort of responsibility and with that, a sense of discipline.
I came close to signing Elvis Presley. I offered $25,000 for his contract and they asked for $45,000 and I just didn't have the other $20,000. I should have gotten the Beatles. But one of my lawyers kind of messed up.
Hitler killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs. As it is, they succumbed anyway in their millions.