Ray Bradbury is for many reasons the most influential writer in my life. Throughout our long friendship Ray supplied not only his terrific stories but a grand model of what a writer could be should be and yet rarely is: brilliant and charming and accessible willing to tolerate and to teach happy to inspire but also to be inspired.

I would have told him that I appreciated his friendship through the years and that I had learned a lot from him. I really loved Frank like you do a brother.

If you're going through friendship issues I would say first of all take a step back. How important is the friendship to you? Sometimes if someone's not being a good friend to you and isn't treating you the way you should be treated then you kind of have to move on sometimes.

No distance of place or lapse of time can lessen the friendship of those who are thoroughly persuaded of each other's worth.

I have a loyalty that runs in my bloodstream when I lock into someone or something you can't get me away from it because I commit that thoroughly. That's in friendship that's a deal that's a commitment. Don't give me paper - I can get the same lawyer who drew it up to break it. But if you shake my hand that's for life.

It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend his faults. So to love a man that you cannot bear to see a stain upon him and to speak painful truth through loving words that is friendship.

Love is friendship that has caught fire. It is quiet understanding mutual confidence sharing and forgiving. It is loyalty through good and bad times. It settles for less than perfection and makes allowances for human weaknesses.

Many a person has held close throughout their entire lives two friends that always remained strange to one another because one of them attracted by virtue of similarity the other by difference.

A man of strength and wisdom John Paul became an inspiration to generations of both Catholics and non-Catholics throughout the world by encouraging freedom promoting peace and respecting all faiths.

My name became known because I was one might say accidentally the target of state repression and because so many people throughout the country and other parts of the world organized around the demand for my freedom.