Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought system planning intelligence and honest purpose as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.

In oneself lies the whole world and if you know how to look and learn the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either the key or the door to open except yourself.

In The Touch the love scenes are the same as they were in The Thorn Birds or anything else I've ever written. I find a way of saying that either it was heaven or hell but in a way that still leaves room for the reader to use their own imagination.

Anyone who said he wasn't afraid during the civil rights movement was either a liar or without imagination. I was scared all the time. My hands didn't shake but inside I was shaking.

We didn't have television until I was about eight years old so it was either the movies or radio. A lot of radio drama. That was our television you know. We had to use our imagination. So it was really those two things and the comics that I immersed myself in as a child.

That neither our thoughts nor passions nor ideas formed by the imagination exist without the mind is what every body will allow.

A great wind is blowing and that gives you either imagination or a headache.

However my parents - both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing quirk that would never pay a mortgage or secure a pension.

Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love love love that is the soul of genius.

I think I've learned that if you want to be successful you have to tell your story honestly and from your heart - and I think a healthy sense of humor doesn't hurt either.

Married people should not be quick to hear what is said by either when in ill humor.

But what I hope for from a book - either one that I write or one that I read - is transparency. I want the story to shine through. I don't want to think of the writer.

My hope and prayer is that the body of Christ in America will awake with holy boldness a boldness content neither with silence nor mere words but that backs up those words with action and results.

In both children and adults there can be a hard-to-deny link between a robust sense of hope and either work productivity or academic achievement.

What I hope in my ideal world is that with each project I'll either get to work with a really great script that would force me to grow or work with a really great actor who will make me better.

If we have any hope of finding ways for seven billion people to live well on planet with finite resources we have to learn to use our resources efficiently. Plastic bags are neither efficient nor environmentally friendly.

Hope is a feeling that life and work have meaning. You either have it or you don't regardless of the state of the world that surrounds you.