Buddy Childers

Enjoy what other people do and learn from them.

If you get good at what you do, part of getting there is enjoying what other players do.

Well, as a kid I did not get Shakespeare. I just never understood it.

Some people like my advice so much that they frame it upon the wall instead of using it.

Greatest thing in life is experience. Even mistakes have value.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

There have been times when I’ve been around people I wouldn’t care to be around, and if I could get away I would. We have a word in Mississippi – we just don’t seem to set horses. In other words, this person is always saying something that gets your goat, y’understand? But when people treat you mean, you dislike them for that, but not because of their person, who they are. I was born and raised in a segregated society, but when I left there I had nobody I disliked other than the people that’d mistreated me, and that only lasted for as long as they were mistreating me.

The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance.

Setting an example is not the main means of influencing others; it is the only means.

Anyone who does anything useful will not go unpaid.

Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger.

The more you know, the more you realise how much you don’t know — the less you know, the more you think you know.

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

What is the one thing that I could do to help you?

We are all a little weird and life’s a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.

If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not working on hard enough problems. And that’s a big mistake.

Giving frees us from the familiar territory of our own needs by opening our mind to the unexplained worlds occupied by the needs of others.