I grew up on a farm in a small town where you do or say one thing and everybody knows about it. You see it happen there's always the town gossip - 'Oh did you hear about so and so or did you hear what went on in this household?' So I learned at a very young age just to keep my mouth shut.

I learned from a very young age that if I pursued the things that truly excited me that they would reward in more important ways like happiness.

At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers and at its worst an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.

I never had little brothers so I was totally not used to hearing a lot of cussing at a young age! I learned what 'pull my finger' meant the hard way.

Of middle age the best that can be said is that a middle-aged person has likely learned how to have a little fun in spite of his troubles.

I came to water late. I learned to swim at the age of 20.

I first learned that there were black people living in some place called other than the United States in the western hemisphere when I was a very little boy and my father told me that when he was a boy about my age he wanted to be an Episcopal priest because he so admired his priest a black man from someplace called Haiti.

In this age which believes that there is a short cut to everything the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way is in the long run the easiest.

Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three and soon discovered there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi.