Randy Pausch Quotes

You've got to live life to write a book about it.

I felt like I had experienced a lot of things in the first chapter of my life, and I wanted it to inspire and motivate people, so I just started writing.

Each person's life is a story that is telling itself in the living.

I used to think, 'How can I write my life story? I'm still living it.'

The further you go, what, I'm gonna wait til I'm 80? Naw, I'm tellin' my story now. I was just moved. I was moved to tell my story. You know? People write books all the time.

Books stay with me and have shaped me and made huge impacts on my life.

People are looking for inspiration, and my books are sometimes the vehicles of what people are looking for.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

I would say I'm an inspirational guidelines book. You can take my life story or scenarios or songs and relate to them and apply them to your everyday life.

As I've gotten older and my life is a lot more stable, I've gotten more into storytelling.

For me, stories were brothers, sisters and friends, filling the long hours between childhood and adolescence, holding up a true mirror in which I might find out who I was rather than a distorted reflection of who I was expected to become.

The words come from here. From memories, from dreams, from people I've known. I'm always writing and reflecting on life. I want to suck it all in.

Artists like Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Albert King, Ann Peebles, Isaac Hayes, and so many more gave me hope when I was an angst-filled teenager trying to make sense of it all... They were my teachers. Through their music, I learned how to live, how to be true to myself, and how to tell my story as a songwriter the way that I was feeling it.

I used to spend so much time reacting and responding to everyone else that my life had no direction. Other people's lives, problems, and wants set the course for my life. Once I realized it was okay for me to think about and identify what I wanted, remarkable things began to take place in my life.

You ought to be able to discover something from your stories. If you don't, probably nobody else will.

People love to have lived a great story, but few people like the work it takes to make it happen.

What I've learned in the last few years is that I am merely a storyteller.

The nearest anyone can come to finding himself at any given age is to find a story that somehow tells him about himself.

When you're young you don't think, 'This person is going to change your life.' But when you start recording your own songs, it comes back and reminds you.

I've produced and gotten to do a lot of optimistic love stories, and that was so where I was at for 10 years in my life. And now I feel like, Okay, now I know how to do that. I want to get scared again; I want to feel the way I felt when I started my company, when I started producing.

I write about personal experiences. I write about things that have happened to me and the people around me, so you just sort of keep this antenna up and on the lookout for things to say.

I meet people in my daily life, people who seem to experience some change and some growth on a personal level, and that gives me hope.

I told as much of my life as I could to encourage people: to encourage others to get to where they should be, where they want to be.

I told my whole life story in my book.

I just sort of write the book I feel like writing given the emotional place I am in my life at the time.