Be brave, my heart [wrote the poet and mercenary Archilochus]. Plant your feet and square your shoulders to the enemy. Meet him among the man-killing spears. Hold your ground. In victory, do not brag; in defeat, do not weep.

the man who really loves his country is not the one who refuses to attack it when he has been unjustly driven from it, but the man whose desire for it is so strong that he will shrink from nothing in his efforts to get back there again.

In an odd way," he says, "your making a hash of this has brought you into the club. We've all committed our share of balls-ups. What counts is setting things right and pressing on.

What will keep us from stopping? Plain old stubbornness.

The professional blows critics off. He doesn't even hear them. Critics, he reminds himself, are the unwitting mouthpieces of Resistance and as such can be truly cunning and pernicious. They can articulate in their reviews the same toxic venom that Resistance itself concocts inside our heads. That is their real evil. Not that we believe them, but that we believe the Resistance in our own minds, for which critics serve as unconscious spokespersons.

I experienced it as a compulsion to self-destruct. I could not finish what I started. The closer I got, the more different ways I'd find to screw it up.

Challenges are what make life interesting and overcoming them is what makes life meaningful.

One mistake does not have to rule a person's entire life.

One mistake does not have to rule a person's entire life.

We're all going to make mistakes; they're inevitable. It's what you do after these mistakes that matters.

I mean, when you grow up in the inner city and you grow up in a single-parent household, that's - those are humbling times, you know?

Bad experience is a school that only fools keep going to.