Put a man and a girl on stage and there is already a story; a man and two girls, there's already a plot.
Be able to hiccup silently, or at least without alerting neighbors to your situation. The first hiccup is an exception.
To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe.
If your head tells you one thing, and your heart tells you another, before you do anything, you should first decide whether you have a better head or a better heart.
Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors. Behind one door is a car, the others, goats. You pick a door, say #1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say #3, which has a goat. He says to you: 'Do you want to pick door #2?' Is it to your advantage to switch your choice of doors?
You can't be wise without being intelligent, but you certainly can be intelligent without being wise.
There's plenty of intelligence in the world, but the courage to do things differently is in short supply.
Cicero's words also increased my personal satisfaction by supporting my long-standing rejection of a conventional point of view.
Surrender comes when you no longer ask, 'Why is this happening to me?'
My natural inclination is to think in scenes. So that's how I write, and the issue for me is usually: what to compress for speed.
My fate has been that what I undertook was fully understood only after the fact.