If where you are is worthwhile then where you are from doesn't matter.

Fail soon so that you can succeed sooner.

Let someone else be the most powerful country, make ours the most peaceful country.

If she says goodbye, someone else will say hi.

I knew so many gangsters, and I call on that experience with them for characters.

[W]hen I put Jorge in the library I did not yet know he was the murderer. He acted on his own, so to speak. And it must not be thought that this is an 'idealistic' position, as if I were saying that the characters have an autonomous life and the author, in a kind of trance, makes them behave as they themselves direct him. That kind of nonsense belongs in term papers. The fact is that the characters are obliged to act according to the laws of the world in which they live. In other words, the narrator is the prisoner of his own premises.

As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.

Cowards say it can't be done, critics say it shouldn't have been done, creator say well done.

That's a good point,' Professor Hirota said. 'But there is one thing we ought to keep in mind in the study of man. Namely, that a human being placed in particular circumstances has the ability and the right to do just the opposite of what the circumstances dictate. The trouble is, we have this odd habit of thinking that men and light both act according to mechanical laws, which leads to some stunning errors. We set things up to make a man angry, and he laughs. We try to make him laugh, and again he does the opposite, he gets angry. Either way, though, he's still a human being.'Hirota had enlarged the scope of the problem again.'Well, then, what you're saying is, no matter what a human being does in a particular set of circumstances, he is being natural,' said the novelist at the far end of the table.'That's it,' Hirota shot back. 'It seems to me that you might create any sort of character in a novel and there would be at least one person in the world just like him. We humans are simply incapable of imagining non-human actions or behavior. It's the writer's fault if we don't believe in his characters as human beings.

What luck has gave you will probably leave you.