You can have anything you want, but not everything. If it was really important to spend an afternoon at my daughter's school, I had to think, how was I going to organize my life to do that? How could I become more efficient? I always tried to put my priorities on the table, personal and professional, and work around them.

But quality of work can be expected only through personal satisfaction, dedication and enjoyment. In our profession, precision and perfection are not a dispensible luxury, but a simple necessity.

I enjoy the work, I enjoy every minute of my professional life.

Across professions, consistency is a direct product of work ethic.

I'm confident to say that if you want to grow in a profession, consistency is the key... I'm strict about my work goals and training.

Without hard work and discipline it is difficult to be a top professional.

America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.

Your law may be perfect, your knowledge of human affairs may be such as to enable you to apply it with wisdom and skill, and yet without individual acquaintance with men, their haunts and habits, the pursuit of the profession becomes difficult, slow, and expensive.

Wedding hasn't affected my professional life at all.

I've had the kind of complex life I write about. I was a single mother for 12 years. I'd been engaged. The wedding fell through. I then discovered I was pregnant and opted to have the child on my own. I was a professor. I was in my mid-30s. I could manage it financially.

Something that I think extends to a lot of African cultures is that the line between performer and audience is blurry. My mom would lead the wedding song regularly, and she isn't a professional singer. Even as an audience member, you're expected to clap and sing the response to the lead.

My brother liked sewing and sculpting and making things, and my sister sewed and painted and cooked and baked. She's a professional baker now and makes the most gorgeous sculpture-like cakes. She's the queen of wedding cakes in the Lake Tahoe area.

No wedding bells for me anymore. I've been happily married to my profession for years.

For Valentine's Day, I wrote my crush a song and had it professionally recorded. I never released it, though, because I wanted it to be a song just for her. I thought it would be more special that way.

For me, one of the toughest things about Valentine's Day is that it gets geared up as the day to profess your love. See, T-E-S-T - that's a bad word that doesn't go with L-O-V-E.

I have been a professor, and I have been a policymaker, and as a professor, you think in terms of truth or absolutes.

When people talk, they lay lines on each other, do a lot of role playing, sidestep, shilly-shally and engage in all manner of vagueness and innuendo. We do this and expect others to do it, yet at the same time we profess to long for the plain truth, for people to say what they mean, simple as that. Such hypocrisy is a human universal.

The truth is that we don't need everyone to like us; we need a few people to love us. Because what's better than being roundly liked is being fully known - an impossibility both professionally and personally if you're so busy being likable that you forget to be yourself.

Live truth instead of professing it.

We can trust our doctors to be professional, to minister equally to their patients without regard to their political or religious beliefs. But we can no longer trust our professors to do the same.

I trust it will not be giving away professional secrets to say that many readers would be surprised, perhaps shocked, at the questions which some newspaper editors will put to a defenseless woman under the guise of flattery.

I grew up skateboarding; it was fun. I didn't think about money, I didn't know how much professional skateboarders made. I just knew that if I became a professional skateboarder, I would achieve a lot and get to travel and do these great things.

It's very expensive to be a professional tennis player with all the travel and the flights and the hotels and everything.

I think travel is probably the downside of playing professional golf, but you've got to do it.