Painting is as difficult as brain surgery. It's not that relaxing. But that's the discipline.
I realized that the worst thing that could happen to me was about to happen to me.
Men do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another. And if you came through this ordeal, you would age with dignity.
But there are no loners. No man lives in a void. His every act is conditioned by his time and his society.
A man's task is to find himself, and if he fails in this, it doesn't much matter what else he finds.
Actors who have tried to play Churchill and MacArthur have failed abysmally because each of those men was a great actor playing himself.
The coconut trees, lithe and graceful, crowd the beach like a minuet of slender elderly virgins adopting flippant poses.
I wake up some mornings and sit and have my coffee and look out at my beautiful garden, and I go, 'Remember how good this is. Because you can lose it. '
It's a mistake to expect the laws of the country to reflect the imperatives of the New Testament and the Sermon on the Mount. I applaud the efforts of the Church to provide for people in need, regardless of where they're from or how they got here. But I think it's a mistake to turn around and expect a nation to act that way. Americans are uniquely tempted to imagine that we are a church, and that we are a universal nation. This is one of the reasons why we're such a dangerous country.
You can't let your personal disposition be dictated by the world around you.
Your criticism may be worse than the conduct you are trying to correct.