I am proud to have been born in Iowa. Through the eyes of a ten-year-old boy, it was a place of adventure and daily discoveries – the wonder of the growing crops, the excitements of the harvest, the journeys to the woods for nuts and hunting, the joys of snowy winters, the comfort of the family fireside, of good food and tender care.

I have Muslim members of my family. I have lived in Muslim countries.

I never went to school more than six months in my life, but I can say this: that among my earliest recollections, I remember how, when a mere child, I used to get irritated when anybody talked to me in a way I could not understand.

Some of my foster families used to send me to the movies to get me out of the house and there I’d sit all day and way into the night. Up in front, there with the screen so big, a little kid all alone, and I loved it. I loved anything that moved up there and I didn’t miss anything that happened and there was no popcorn either.

God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.

I like being with my family. That’s my party.

I guess that’s one of the things about growing up in the fifties – it never occurred to me that you wouldn’t be at least as successful as your parents.

There is no way I would ask others to go on a Virgin Galactic flight if I didn’t feel it was safe enough for myself.

The best fashion advice I’d say would be just to do what makes you comfortable and what makes you feel cute, and that’s how you’re gonna look your best ‚cause when you feel your best, everybody else can feel it, too.

Man and animals are in reality vehicles and conduits of food, tombs of animals, hostels of Death, coverings that consume, deriving life by the death of others.

It’s still scary every time I go back to the past. Each morning, my heart catches. When I get there, I remember how the light was, where the draft was coming from, what odors were in the air. When I write, I get all the weeping out.

My dad was the town drunk. Most of the time that’s not so bad; but New York City?

Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone.

My mom’s one of 13 siblings, and they all got six kids, and till I was 13 everybody was in Compton.

I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.

My mother and my father have been married 50 years, and he’s just started to understand that something’s wrong with the system. He accepted the whole thing, you see. Yet this industrious kind of engagement didn’t bring him the success, according to American terms, that he wanted. I was probably affected by this very much. In fact, I know I was.

My whole family are hams. They’re storytellers and everyone outdoes the next one.

He who can be, and therefore is, another’s, and he who participates in reason enough to apprehend, but not to have, is a slave by nature.

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.

As a father and now a grandfather to three wonderful grandchildren, I know how magical the first year of a child’s life is but also how much hard work it takes. Being able to spend as much time as possible with your loved ones is absolutely vital, especially early on.

The world, we are told, was made especially for man – a presumption not supported by all the facts. A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God’s universe, which they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves.

My family was mostly unemployed working class.

Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.

Those who know me know I’m passionate about lists, and top of my list of priorities is my family. My wife Joan and I do not consider our legacy to our children to be wealth or fame but the opportunity to pursue happiness by following their own path.

Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.

There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.

I am not a yachting person, by nature, but I have just enough experience on the sea under sail to feel a certain nostalgia for it when I see a big white racing yacht heeled over at cruising speed on the ocean, and I can still tie a mean bowline knot on just about anything in less than 10 seconds.

I remember at the age of five travelling on a trolley car with my mother past a group of women on a picket line at a textile plant, seeing them being viciously beaten by security people. So that kind of thing stayed with me.

Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived.

Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling.

I refuse to feel guilty. I feel guilty about too much in my life but not about money. I went through periods when I had nothing, so somebody in my family has to get stinkin‘ wealthy.

Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.

A mother defends herself with a heart filled with love before doing so with words. I wonder whether there is any love for the church in the hearts of those who pay so much attention to the scandals.

The earth laughs in flowers.

If you were the President of the United States or the Queen of England – you couldn’t have a person who would be more protective than my mother was for me. Which meant really that I could dare to do all sorts of things.

Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years.

Live dangerously and you live right.

A tramp, a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always hopeful of romance and adventure.

My dad had a church of 90 people when I was born. It was just, over the years it continued to grow.

I cannot remember a moment in my life when I have not felt the love of my family. We were a family that would have killed for each other – and we still are.

It is the flash which appears, the thunderbolt will follow.

The extreme weakness of quantum gravitational effects now poses some philosophical problems; maybe nature is trying to tell us something new here: maybe we should not try to quantize gravity.

Lil Wayne, that’s my brother. Birdman, that’s family.

I shall proceed from the simple to the complex. But in war more than in any other subject we must begin by looking at the nature of the whole; for here more than elsewhere the part and the whole must always be thought of together.

One time, this guy was bothering my mother, and me and my brothers had a stern talking with the guy and a little bit of physicality with him. So he disappeared. But I’m not a magician.

It feels kinda weird being back in a high school cause I haven’t been in a high school for about a year. So um, it’s kinda interesting coming back, and y’know seeing the lockers, with all the signs, the handmade signs, so being in high school again is a little bit strange but in a good way.

My grandmother took me to church on Sunday all day long, every Sunday into the night. Then Monday evening was the missionary meeting. Tuesday evening was usher board meeting. Wednesday evening was prayer meeting. Thursday evening was visit the sick. Friday evening was choir practice. I mean, and at all those gatherings, we sang.

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.

I’ve made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I’m convinced of the opposite.

God’s dream is that you and I and all of us will realize that we are family, that we are made for togetherness, for goodness, and for compassion.

My father moved to Hawaii from Brooklyn and my mother came there as a child from the Philippines. They met at a show where my dad was playing percussion. My mom was a hula dancer.

A hundred struggle and drown in the breakers. One discovers the new world. But rather, ten times rather, die in the surf, heralding the way to that new world, than stand idly on the shore.

Sitting on a bedroom floor crying is something that makes you feel really alone. If someone’s singing about that feeling, you feel bonded to that person.

People who work for me know that family comes first. And I’m fortunate to have a family that is very supportive of the work I do, so I don’t have to live two separate lives.

Train up a child in the way that he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.

I was a Chicago Bulls, Michael Jordan fan growing up.

Children sweeten labours, but they make misfortunes more bitter.

You’re unlikely to discover something new without a lot of practice on old stuff, but further, you should get a heck of a lot of fun out of working out funny relations and interesting things.

There is but one law for all, namely that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity – the law of nature and of nations.

The first story I finished was when I was six years old.

Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.