#or

I didn't finish the stories until we went to the Philippines and I got malaria. I couldn't work and I didn't have any money, but I had seven stories. So I wrote three or four more. ↗

— Denis Johnson

#finish #four #got #had #i

Your world is as big as you make it. ↗

— Georgia Douglas Johnson

#make #our world #world #you #your

Life is full of doors that don't open when you knock, equally spaced amid those that open when don't want them to. ↗

— Roger Zelazny

#opportunity #equality

I didn't have to win, and winning wasn't important to me. Being world champion wasn't important to me. What was important to me was entertaining the audience, and whether that meant winning, losing, singing, or whatever it was on the live show we were doing every week, which was awesome, I was game for it. ↗

— Dwayne Johnson

#awesome #being #champion #doing #entertaining

Become so wrapped up in something that you forget to be afraid. ↗

— Lady Bird Johnson

#become #forget #something #up #wrapped

A poet or prose narrator usually looks back on what he has achieved against a backdrop of the years that have passed, generally finding that some of these achievements are acceptable, while others are less so. ↗

— Eyvind Johnson

#achieved #achievements #against #back #backdrop

I have found that I always learn more from my mistakes than from my successes. If you aren't making some mistakes, you aren't taking enough chances. ↗

— John Sculley

#chances #enough #found #i #i always

As the chapters took shape, a change came over her. It was the double-sided recognition that this book, the last that she would write, might achieve esteem and success equal to her great novel, but that its emotional heart would lie in her own unhappiness for having failed to find the one thing she wanted. For the first time she was a character in her own writing, and her frailties and mistakes were trapped on the page by the beauty and unsparing focus of her prose. Towards the end it was a battle to finish a page. The story was the story she had told herself for decades, deep within her own mind, and now as it grew, line by line, on the paper before her, she wrestled with each turn in the path all over again, as if it were still possible to change its course with the power of her words. ↗

— Frederick Weisel

#failing #frederick-weisel #story #teller #weisel

Many men of science and poets have in their own manner, by various ways and means, and aided by others, sought unceasingly to create a more tolerable world for everyone. ↗

— Eyvind Johnson

#create #everyone #manner #many #means

I don't smoke marijuana anymore. I don't drink. Marijuana is a handicap. So is alcohol. Alcohol is a terrible handicap. But in spite of being a handicap, it shouldn't be criminal. ↗

— Gary Johnson

#anymore #being #criminal #drink #handicap