I went to several different grade schools all over the West Coast. I got polio when I was 8 and spent eight months in the hospital and a rehab clinic in Seattle.

I've made more money than I could spend in five lifetimes.

The day after my high school graduation in 1952, I headed to Alaska. I was 17. I started out greasing equipment, then became a heavy-crane operator. I made and saved good money there for two years.

I always marked up a piece of paper before taking a job, looking at the pluses and minuses. If the latter outnumbered the former, I would pass.

Good-faith re-examination of a position you've held in the past should be seen as a virtue, not a vice.

Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth, which God has set in all men's souls.

I didn't feel ready to leave home, because it went from no freedom to all freedom. And I was like, 'Oh, my God, I don't know what I'm doing in college.' There seemed to be no like-minded people where I was... I didn't have a clan. I didn't have a choir... There was no safety net.

Whether the family goes on a spiritual basis or not, the alcoholic member has to if he would recover. The others must be convinced of his new status beyond the shadow of a doubt. Seeing is believing to most families who have lived with a drinker.