"Those who give up on their dreams shouldn't influence you to give up on yours."

“As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.”

Source : Draft of a preface in "Notebook 16". "The Collected Works of J.M. Synge", Volume 1. Introduction, 1962.

“You know, God gave me a gift to do other things besides play the game of basketball.”

“I am very optimistic about -- about Iraq. I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration. You're going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You're going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government,”

“The wisest man may always learn something from the humblest peasant.”

“When forced to leave my house for an extended period of time, I take my typewriter with me, and together we endure the wretchedness of passing through the X-ray scanner. The laptops roll merrily down the belt, while I’m instructed to stand aside and open my bag. To me it seems like a normal enough thing to be carrying, but the typewriter’s declining popularity arouses suspicion and I wind up eliciting the sort of reaction one might expect when traveling with a cannon. It’s a typewriter,’ I say. ‘You use it to write angry letters to airport security.”

“Truly upon mortals cometh swift of foot their evil and his offence upon him that trespasseth against Right.”

“A great writer has a high respect for values. His essential function is to raise life to the dignity of thought, and this he does by giving it a shape.”

“The prodigious waste of human life occasioned by this perpetual struggle for room and food, was more than supplied by the mighty power of population, acting, in some degree, unshackled, from the constant habit of emigration.”