Speech

The most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.

Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. It is our default setting, hardwired into our boards at birth.

You have to love what you do. If you don't love it, don't do it.

Never ever give up. Don't give up. Don't allow it to happen. If there's a concrete wall in front of you, go through it, go over it, go around it, but get to the other side of that wall.

Keep the big picture in mind, but never lose sight of the details. Because if you lose sight of the details, they can send you down.

There is nothing, believe me, more satisfying, more gratifying than true adulthood. The adulthood that is the span of life before you. The process of becoming one is not inevitable. Its achievement is a difficult beauty, an intensely hard-won glory.

You are your own stories and therefore free to imagine and experience what it means to be human without wealth, without domination over others, without reckless arrogance, without fear of others unlike you.

I am a teller of stories and therefore an optimist, a believer in the ethical bend of the human heart, a believer in the mind's disgust with fraud and its appetite for truth, a believer in the ferocity of beauty. So, from my point of view, I see your life as already artful, waiting, just waiting and ready for you to make it art.

To live life at its fullest you have to have the chutzpah to accept challenges.

If you never try, you'll never succeed, and as bad as failure feels, success feels so much better.

The biggest mistake you can make is to be complacent and think that you have lots of extra time on your hands. You might, but you also might not.