You're not a product of your nature. That is your genetic makeup or your nurture, the things that have happened to you. Of course those things affect you powerfully, but they do not determine you.

This sounds really weird, but I feel like God has given me so many beauty dilemmas so I can help people.

Art can't be taught; passion can't be taught; discipline can't be taught; but craft can be taught. And writing is both an art and a craft.

I think leadership is not something you learn; it's something you discover.

I wrote things for the school's newspaper, and - like all teenagers - I dabbled in poetry.

I think, in the grand epic, Jesus is the hero of our stories. And our stories, as they were, are subplots in a grand epic and our job is not to be the hero of any story. Our job is to be a saint in a story that he is telling.

God chose me for a reason. My momma tells me that every day. I know there's a million people who want to be in my shoes.

The best things and best people rise out of their separateness I'm against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise.

The poet, as everyone knows, must strike his individual note sometime between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. He may hold it a long time, or a short time, but it is then that he must strike it or never. School and college have been conducted with the almost express purpose of keeping him busy with something else till the danger of his ever creating anything is past.

An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding.

The mark of a good action is that it appears inevitable in retrospect.

To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming is the only end of life.