If you're not being rejected regularly - maybe you're not trying hard enough.
A great goal in life is the only fortune worth finding.
I have been through a lot and have suffered a great deal. But I have had lots of happy moments, as well. Every moment one lives is different from the other. The good, the bad, hardship, the joy, the tragedy, love, and happiness are all interwoven into one single, indescribable whole that is called life. You cannot separate the good from the bad. And perhaps there is no need to do so, either.
We should all do something to right the wrongs that we see and not just complain about them.
Once you can express yourself, you can tell the world what you want from it. All the changes in the world, for good or evil, were first brought about by words.
If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do matters very much.
If you want things to be right, you have to do them yourself
Yes, I know, shaming, isn't it? I always say you can take the girl out of the 80s, but you can't take the 80s out of the girl. Before I wrote my first novel, I was reading one of the self-help classics – and it's as cheesy as you like, so feel free to laugh, Guardian readers – called Awaken The Giant Within, by Tony Robbins, and it inspired me to try. I like motivational books, because I like the go-getting American spirit – your destiny is in your own hands, life is what you make it, don't accept your limitations, jump before you're pushed, leap before you look.
I haven't got the kind of discipline where I can turn my emotion inside out and then just switch off. It affects me fairly profoundly and I don't like putting myself through that kind of mincer every day.
Winston Churchill led the life that many men would love to live. He survived 50 gunfights and drank 20,000 bottles of champagne. [. . . ] And of course, by resisting Hitler, he saved Europe and perhaps the world.
Sometimes you have to gag on fancy before you can appreciate plain.