Nothing is more fatal to success than taking one's job as a matter of course.
Read a lot. Write a lot. Have fun.
The old saw about old dogs and new tricks only applies to certain people.
I went to college, but I learned to write by reading - and writing.
I believe it is impossible to make sense of life in this world except through art.
It doesn't matter who you are, or what you've done, or think you can do. There's a confrontation with destiny awaiting you. Somewhere, there is a chile you cannot eat.
I've said this before, and I say it again. Bagels can be an enormous power for good or for evil. It is up to us to decide how we will use them.
To me, punk rock is the freedom to create, freedom to be successful, freedom to not be successful, freedom to be who you are. It's freedom.
The well-meaning contention that all ideas have equal merit seems to me little different from the disastrous contention that no ideas have any merit.
One of my great experiences in life was to be interviewed on a late-night talk show by a guy named Tom Snyder. He was interviewing me on a book I had written on the New Testament of the Bible called Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, and we talked about the dating of the books of the New Testament, and I said, "Well, the consensus is that the gospels were written some forty to seventy years after the crucifixion. " And he stopped me and said, "Wait a minute, Bishop, that means they couldn't have been written by eyewitnesses. "
The thing that matters is meaning! It drives everything. Builders align their attention to the things that matter to them, and they know a lot about that stuff.