Jack Kerouac influenced me quite a bit as a writer… in the Arab sense that the enemy of my enemy was my friend.

Religion can be the enemy of God. It’s often what happens when God, like Elvis, has left the building.

Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot that it do singe yourself.

I’ve used the prestige and influence of having been a president of the United States as effectively as possible. And secondly, I’ve still been able to carry out my commitments to peace and human rights and environmental quality and freedom and democracy and so forth.

And as a writer, one of the things that I’ve always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that’s what we’re supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react.

Very rarely do I talk off the top of my head on stage. I’m not an improv guy. I’m a writer-guy who presents what he’s written.

Men are what their mothers made them.

If you are a parent, you have probably already realized that your children are always watching what you do. And just as children watch their parents and emulate their behavior, so do employees who are watching their bosses.

I believe that God has put gifts and talents and ability on the inside of every one of us. When you develop that and you believe in yourself and you believe that you’re a person of influence and a person of purpose, I believe you can rise up out of any situation.

I believe in that old adage that ‚as goes California, so goes the country.‘

Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.

I feel like I’m changing pop culture.

I would be lying if I didn’t admit sadness that our wonderful airline is merging with another. Because I’m not American, the U.S. Department of Transportation stipulated I take some of my shares in Virgin America as non-voting shares, reducing my influence over any takeover. So there was sadly nothing I could do to stop it.

When you find a guy who is powerful, a big father figure, you latch onto him immediately.

Celebrity is ridiculous and silly and it’s mad that people like me are listened to – you know, rap stars and movie stars.

The more you are talked about the less powerful you are.

If you wish to be a writer, write.

Ten people who speak make more noise than ten thousand who are silent.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

As far as I’m concerned, I’m a writer who’s writing books, and therefore, I don’t want to die. You’d miss the end of the book wouldn’t you? You can’t die with an unfinished book.

Power over a man’s subsistence is power over his will.

The unsuccessful person is burdened by learning, and prefers to walk down familiar paths. Their distaste for learning stunts their growth and limits their influence.

People that’s in power – the central banks, these fiat currencies that are traded globally – they got influence over the messaging and the narrative in the media.

It is easy enough to be friendly to one’s friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.

A song has to take on character, shape, body and influence people to an extent that they use it for their own devices. It must affect them not just as a song, but as a lifestyle.

The writer’s greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all.

For a creative writer possession of the ‚truth‘ is less important than emotional sincerity.

When I say ‚Crush your enemy‘, I don’t literally mean it.

Being acknowledged for your work is always a great accomplishment, whether it’s people in my city, kids in the street, all the way up to the Grammys.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

Whatever words we utter should be chosen with care for people will hear them and be influenced by them for good or ill.

The Medici created and destroyed me.

I like the enemy knowing there are a few guys like me around.

A true critic ought to dwell upon excellencies rather than imperfections, to discover the concealed beauties of a writer, and communicate to the world such things as are worth their observation.

And you find as a writer there are certain spots on the planet where you write better than others, and I believe in that. And New Orleans is one of them.

All the president is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing, and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway.

I’m not a playwright.

I don’t think that a leader can control, to any great extent, his destiny. Very seldom can he step in and change the situation if the forces of history are running in another direction.

In the practice of tolerance, one’s enemy is the best teacher.

Before I became a writer, I was running a jazz bar in the center of Tokyo, which means that I worked in filthy air all the time late into the night. I was very excited when I started making a living out of my writing, and I decided, ‚I will live in nothing but an absolutely healthy way.‘

The moment people feel they know what to expect from you, your spell on them is broken. More: You have ceded them power.

I was brought up to try to see what was wrong and right it. Since I am a writer, writing is how I right it.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Think twice before you speak, because your words and influence will plant the seed of either success or failure in the mind of another.

I like Italian movies. I was frequently there in the ’60s, in Rome and the vicinity. It was a great period in life. I was very influenced by their stuff.

For ideas to prevail, many of their defenders have to die in obscurity. Their anonymous influence makes itself felt.

I was born during the war and grew up in a time of rationing. We didn’t have anything. It’s influenced the way I look at the world.

I believe that many of my young guys lived because I didn’t waste their lives because I didn’t have the vision in my mind of how to destroy the enemy at least cost to our guys and to the innocents on the battlefields.

Diana Ross is a big inspiration to all of us. We all grew up watching everything about her – her mike placement, her grace, her style and her class.

I think some people would love to be able to make the clothes I make – and of course, I do influence them, but they keep simplifying, and minimalism doesn’t quite work.

Leadership is influence.

Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.

My favorite literary heroine is Jo March. It is hard to overstate what she meant to a small, plain girl called Jo, who had a hot temper and a burning ambition to be a writer.

No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.

If I had a talent, it was for looking askew at everything, possibly more than my contemporaries. But I had to really push myself to be a writer.

It is wise to persuade people to do things and make them think it was their own idea.

Friend, there’s no greater investment in life than in being a people builder. Relationships are more important than our accomplishments.

The truest form of any form of revolutionary Left, whatever you want to call it, was Jack Kerouac, E.E. Cummings, & Ginsberg’s period. Excuse me, but that’s where it was at.

See, people are watching you. Especially your children. They’re taking in every single thing you do. They are like video cameras with legs. And they are always in the record mode. They learn more from what you do than from what you say.

Do something wonderful, people may imitate it.