Born on November 14th

"So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give it expressive meaning."

"To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable."

"You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down... some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today."

"Inspiration may be a form of super-consciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness I wouldn't know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness."

"If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong."

"The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, 'Is there a meaning to music?' My answer would be, 'Yes.' And 'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?' My answer to that would be, 'No.'"

"A melody is not merely something you can hum."

"In the field of motivation & action, do not wait for a clear sky; the most resilient journeys begin in the midst of the storm."

"Success is not a destination of comfort, but the daily practice of stepping into the unknown. As a poet & novelist, this is the foundational truth I have observed."

"Your potential is a fire waiting to be kindled by the friction of consistent effort."

"Skating is tough to pick up when you are a grown up."

"You get a lot of speeding tickets, and you say, 'I'm so unlucky!' No, you're not. You're speeding. Slow down."

"I was taking hitting clinics every chance I got. I really worked on it. It was just fun to be given that invitation from the director to make the baseball as good as we can."

"Hire the best people, and trust what you hired them to do."

"I grew up Catholic, so the more non-denominational Christian experience was a new experience for me."

"If Gretzky was velvet, Ovechkin is electricity."

"I'm sure that President Trump will do plenty of things that people don't like, plenty of things people do like, and the people who don't like it, at that point, certainly take advantage of your rights and protest it - and try to seek change or do whatever you want."

"There's nobility in hard work, traditional values."

"I got to be good friends with Scott Hamilton."

"'It's a Wonderful Life' was a mainstream Hollywood movie about faith, redemption, religion, and it was rated G."

"When you do a play, or even a movie, you have weeks to finesse your character. You really understand why they do what they do. In TV, you get new material weekly about your character."

"Joe Jackson was a tragic figure. He was a serene country boy who signed a confession he couldn't read. He was illiterate."

"You have to identify your shot and be 'Push your luck' ready for it."

"All these big corporations like Amazon, those places have great distribution arms, but they can't create content."

"The more I learned about Shoeless Joe, the more I felt he was maligned."

"With the Red Sox, you have more of a literary interest in it. You know they're going to lose; you're just interested in how the plot is going to unfold."

"I felt like the world of baseball in 1919 was much closer to what A-ball would be now - guys riding buses, there's no training staff, and there's a lot of paranoia."

"The great thing for me about 'The Resurrection of Gavin Stone' is it's a throwback to the old fashioned Hollywood movie that you can watch with your family, has a message, and is funny and entertaining. They didn't call them faith-based movies; they just called them good movies."

"Why should a filmmaker turn over the irreplaceable asset, the movie, to a distribution center?"

"I had heard that Robert Duvall was interested in doing 'Lonesome Dove,' and he's one of those actors with whom I'd work on any project. So I tracked down the script and started to bug the producer, Dyson Lovell, to get in there."