Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.

If you want to see the true measure of a man, watch how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.

I was set free because my greatest fear had been realized, and I still had a daughter who I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It meets a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts that is something on which to pride yourself but poverty itself is romanticized by fools.

Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.

You lose your individuality a huge amount when you have no money, and I certainly had that experience.

'Harry Potter' gave me back self respect. Harry gave me a job to do that I loved more than anything else.

I do get recognized, but I must say Edinburgh is a fantastic city to live if you're well-known. There is an innate respect for privacy in Edinburgh people, and I also think they're used to seeing me walking around, so I don't think I'm a very big deal.

Death is just life's next big adventure.

Death obsesses me, yes it does. I can't really understand why it doesn't obsess everyone - I think it does really, I'm just a little more out about it.

To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.

I don't read 'chick lit,' fantasy or science fiction but I'll give any book a chance if it's lying there and I've got half an hour to kill.

It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.

I just write what I wanted to write. I write what amuses me. It's totally for myself. I never in my wildest dreams expected this popularity.

It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.

We're a phenomenally snobby society, and it's such a rich seam. The middle class is so funny: it's the class I know best, and it's the class where you find the most pretension, so that's what makes the middle classes so funny.

I'm interested in that drive, that rush to judgment, that is so prevalent in our society. We all know that pleasurable rush that comes from condemning, and in the short term it's quite a satisfying thing to do, isn't it?

I received free health care.

Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the fates.

His priority did not seem to be to teach them what he knew, but rather to impress upon them that nothing, not even... knowledge, was foolproof.

Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain.

Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.

Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power to that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.

The truth. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and must therefore be treated with great caution.

I think you're working and learning until you die.

The middle class is so funny, it's the class I know best, and it's the class where you find the most pretension, so that's what makes the middle classes so funny.

Whether you come back by page or by the big screen, Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home.

However my parents - both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing quirk that would never pay a mortgage or secure a pension.

Our top story tonight: Famous TV dolphin flipper was arrested today on prostitution ring charges. He allegedly was seen transporting two 16 year olds across state line for immoral porpoises.

When I'm on stage, it's a little world I've created where I'm sort of the thing, so I have total control over everything that happens. When we're improvising, I'm with someone I totally trust. I know things are going to work out. I don't have those guarantees in life. There are no consequences on stage.

Once you become famous, there is nothing left to become but infamous.

I can do whatever I want - I'm rich, I'm famous, and I'm bigger than you.

People in the business will stay with you through drugs and alcohol and divorces and insanity and everything else, but you have a failure, pal, and they don't want to know nothing about you!

The most aggressive artists often hide their romantic side.

I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until finally I became that person. Or he became me.

Insanity runs in my family. It practically gallops.

My formula for living is quite simple. I get up in the morning and I go to bed at night. In between, I occupy myself as best I can.

I grew up with a pretty tough mom. She was a self-appointed neighborhood watchdog, and if she saw that any of the local boys were up to no good, she would scold them on the spot. Although she is only 5 feet 2, she was famous in our neighborhood for intimidating men three times her size and getting them to do the right thing.

NASA projects often have romantic names that link into a long history of exploration and adventure: Atlantis and Discovery, for example.

Every congresswoman surely endures the same strains that drive some of her male colleagues to have affairs: lots of travel, families far away, heady work that makes a domestic routine seem distant and boring. But the stakes are much higher for women, because they are still judged by a different standard.

In China, a lot of the opening up of private entrepreneurship is happening because women are starting businesses, small businesses, faster than men.

Feminism was about making women's lives less constrained and giving them more choices.

The average American worker gets something like 14 days of paid vacation. In my school, you'd use up ten of those taking care of your kids on teacher professional days, then tack on a couple more for kids getting sick.

The classic war movies of the post-Vietnam era have generally taken on grand, philosophical themes: the meaninglessness of war, the grinding down of man by the machine - the machine being war itself, represented by someone like Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in 'Full Metal Jacket,' the sadistic marine who turns his boys into instruments of death.

Aristotle was famous for knowing everything. He taught that the brain exists merely to cool the blood and is not involved in the process of thinking. This is true only of certain persons.

Some people lose all respect for the lion unless he devours them instantly. There is no pleasing some people.

I don't like to boast, but I have probably skipped more poetry than any other person of my age and weight in this country.

Caesar might have married Cleopatra, but he had a wife at home. There's always something.

The Dodo never had a chance. He seems to have been invented for the sole purpose of becoming extinct and that was all he was good for.