Quotes on Time

I can have everything I love at the same time. I can have my family, I can have my friends, and I can have my quiet life, which I also like. I can have my football, and I can have everything together, and I don't need to give up one to be better than what I am.

Sometimes you have to ask the question as if it's going to be your last question - as if it's going to be the last time you talk to that person.

That's another hallmark of truth, is that it snaps things together. People write to me all the time and say it's as if things were coming together in my mind. It's like the Platonic idea that all learning was remembering. You have a nature, and when you feel that nature articulated, it's it's like the act of snapping the puzzle pieces together.

Eight years of work can be copied in six months. It wasn't inevitable that it was going to work. A stolen design is stolen time.

I think a lot about how ideas spread, how information spreads, why is it that something you're really proud of and you spend a lot of time creating sometimes doesn't go anywhere, and something that you kind of do on the side, on a lark, ends up getting shared and passed around and having this big impact.

I want to make sure everyone's having a good time because when I ask you to come to my movie, I'm throwing a party for you. I want you to enjoy it.

I was growing up and maturing at a time where we were invisible, man. We were nowhere except negative. Any time you saw a Latin person in Hollywood or on TV, they were some sort of negative character.

I believe race is too heavy a burden to carry into the 21st century. It's time to lay it down. We all came here in different ships, but now we're all in the same boat.

Theatre has had a very important role in changing South Africa. There was a time when all other channels of expression were closed that we were able to break the conspiracy of silence, to educate people inside South Africa and the outside world. We became the illegal newspaper.

One of the humbling things about having written more than one novel is the sense that every time you begin, that new empty page does not know who you are.

All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium.

Who in the same given time can produce more than others has vigor; who can produce more and better, has talents; who can produce what none else can, has genius.

Not many people were speaking truth to power in the '80s. I had a really good time doing it - I found it gratifying. It was a joy to have an opportunity to say what you believed. It's challenging to do it in fiction, but I liked writing the novels. I liked writing 'Democracy' particularly.

While we celebrate our diversity, what surprises me time and time again as I travel around the constituency is that we are far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us.

Time is more value than money. You can get more money, but you cannot get more time.

You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.

I've inherited a sense of that loss from my parents because it was so palpable all the time while I was growing up, the sense of what my parents had sacrificed in moving to the United States, and yet at the same time, building a life here and all that that entailed.

I wasn't born Austrian; I wasn't born German. My roots are from Africa, and I do not have any reason for not wanting to celebrate that. Every time that I can, I like to kind of mention it, you know, just to keep people sort of knowing exactly what's going on. My French is pretty good, but I'm still African, thank you very much.

By the time I wrote my memoir, 'Men We Reaped,' I had been running from writing it for a long time. When the events in the book were happening, I knew I'd probably write about them one day. I didn't want to. I'd studied fiction, and I was committed to establishing myself as a fiction writer first.

The NFL protects you for five years after you retire, but the multitude of injuries come 10, 15, 20 years after you retire. Those are when the ailments start to come, and at that time, you're not covered. That's doing a disservice to former players.

When I first had a child, I really had a hard time trying to figure out how it was all going to fit together. Because I felt like, when I was with him, I wanted to be writing and I should be writing. And when I was writing, I felt like I should be with him, and wanted to be with him. So I was unhappy a lot.