I sang a song at my sister’s wedding. My mother forced me into that, too. But that one felt all right.

Our affections as well as our bodies are in perpetual flux.

The poetry you read has been written for you, each of you – black, white, Hispanic, man, woman, gay, straight.

My mom, she was a very, very soft woman. It was hard for her to yell or even curse. But when it came to fighting for her kids, she found a strength she didn’t always know she had.

I love you when you bow in your mosque, kneel in your temple, pray in your church. For you and I are sons of one religion, and it is the spirit.

What really motivates people at Facebook is building something that’s worthwhile, that they’re going to be proud to show to friends and family.

I won’t be satisfied until people want to hear me sing without looking at me. Of course, that doesn’t mean I want them to stop looking.

A son can bear with equanimity the loss of his father, but the loss of his inheritance may drive him to despair.

One of the things I realized is that if you do not take control over your time and your life, other people will gobble it up. If you don’t prioritize yourself, you constantly start falling lower and lower on your list, your kids fall lower and lower on your list.

My mother was a very natural woman. She never spoiled herself, never wore make-up, and wore modest jewellery, but she always had a few special items for when she wanted to feel like a lady. One of those special items – and I remember it because it seemed so elegant – was her Guerlain powder.

Tears come from the heart and not from the brain.

My songs have always been frustrating themes, relationships that I’ve had. And now that I’m in love, I expect it to be really happy, or at least there won’t be half as much anger as there was.

I have ‚Parents‘ magazine in my home.

An author who speaks about their own books is almost as bad as a mother who speaks about her own children.

Imagine your family finally making it from nothing to something, and finally getting things going, and finally buying a beautiful house and taking care of your children – and the next day, it’s completely all gone. Zero. Boom. Flat broke. So that’s when I had to man up.

The greatest pleasures are only narrowly separated from disgust.

There are a lot of groups that feel a little bit strange around me, because I am inclusive.

When you’re in comedy, people always come up and say, ‚Oh, it must be so hard.‘ It really isn’t hard unless you’re not good at it. If you can do it, its really kind of fun and easy.

He who is overly attached to his family members experiences fear and sorrow, for the root of all grief is attachment. Thus one should discard attachment to be happy.

The kids are a big part of my schedule.

I didn’t have to win, and winning wasn’t important to me. Being world champion wasn’t important to me. What was important to me was entertaining the audience, and whether that meant winning, losing, singing, or whatever it was on the live show we were doing every week, which was awesome, I was game for it.

For me, often, there’s such a cloud of melancholia about knowing I’m going to have to leave my daughter on her own. I don’t know what age that is going to be, thank God. It just doubles me up in grief.

Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no. That’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim American kid believing that he or she could be president?

Sometimes I wish I had taken the Bob Dylan route and sang songs where my voice would not go out on me every night, so I could have a career if I wanted.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

The greatest gift that you can give to others is the gift of unconditional love and acceptance.

Historically, the family has played the primary role in educating children for life, with the school providing supplemental scaffolding to the family.

As men are not able to fight against death, misery, ignorance, they have taken it into their heads, in order to be happy, not to think of them at all.

Love is the ability and willingness to allow those that you care for to be what they choose for themselves without any insistence that they satisfy you.

Maybe there is no actual place called hell. Maybe hell is just having to listen to our grandparents breathe through their noses when they’re eating sandwiches.

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.

Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed.

Hatred is active, and envy passive dislike; there is but one step from envy to hate.

The components of anxiety, stress, fear, and anger do not exist independently of you in the world. They simply do not exist in the physical world, even though we talk about them as if they do.

I put out one album one week, and I’m already worried about the next one. I feel a lot of emotion throughout the course of a day. But not to the point where you need to be worried about me.

No pressure, no diamonds.

I’m pretty sure I don’t have any songs that are about how much I love someone. They’re all either about, like, ‚I hate you,‘ or ‚You make me hate me.‘

Everybody always laughs because I feel so much more comfortable with, like, a giant paper bag on my whole body and paint on my face. Sometimes I try really hard to take it all off. But inevitably what’s underneath is still not a straight edge. And I don’t think it ever will be.

Adapt yourself to the things among which your lot has been cast and love sincerely the fellow creatures with whom destiny has ordained that you shall live.

We should not look down on our first ancestors.

You bring children into the world. You love them with heart and soul.

Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong.

The Sabbath provides a wonderful opportunity to strengthen family ties.

I’m the type person, my safe place to be emotional is the booth.

Everything I have, my career, my success, my family, I owe to America.

No duty the Executive had to perform was so trying as to put the right man in the right place.

That’s the most terrible thing about being an author – standing there at your mother’s funeral, but you don’t switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill. Who was it said – one of the famous lady novelists – ‚unhappy is the family that contains an author‘?

What’s done can’t be undone.

Fear is real, but so is love.

There’s always a bittersweet kind of thing, but I feel like everything had to work out the way it is. Everything that had to happen, happened.

I have good days and bad days.

If my mother knew I did this for a living, she’d kill me. She thinks I’m selling dope.

Who will take responsibility for raising the next generation?

Love has reasons which reason cannot understand.

To bring a healthy child into this world, raise them right and watch them grow is the biggest miracle there is.

When I was growing up, I wanted to adopt, because I was aware there were kids that didn’t have parents.

The scab is a traitor to his God, his mother, and his class.

Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.

I’m drawn to bad romances.

If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.

Most damage that others do us is out of fear, humiliation and pain. Those feelings occur in all of us, not just in those of us who profess a certain religious or racial devotion.