My work as an artist is completely separate from my work as a philanthropist.

Cooking is about passion, so it may look slightly temperamental in a way that it’s too assertive to the naked eye.

If you only believe that you’re an artist when you have a big advance in your pocket and a single coming out, I would say that’s quite soulless. You have to have a sense of your own greatness and your own ability from a very deep place inside you. I am the one with the litmus test in my hands of what people need to hear next.

My focus is my art, and that’s what I love to do. I have to be really passionate in order to do something. I’ve turned down many things that I just didn’t believe in.

I’m just someone who likes cooking and for whom sharing food is a form of expression.

Turn resolutely to work, to recreation, or in any case to physical exercise till you are so tired you can’t help going to sleep, and when you wake up you won’t want to worry.

I feel like people can relate to me because we all go through wins and roadblocks and passion and pain, and it’s a vibe.

My days, my years, my life has seen up and downs, lights and darknesses. If I wrote only and continually of the ‚light‘ and never mentioned the other, then as an artist, I would be a liar.

I want to be an artist, an actress with integrity, and that includes all kinds of parts.

My purpose is to make exciting music, and I feel like I’ll be doing that for the rest of my life, so there’s no pressure.

Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.

Man lives for science as well as bread.

I listen to music all day every day. I can’t not listen to music. It’s kind of scary how much I listen to music, but it’s what I love, and it’s all I care about, so I’m good with it.

Success in its highest and noblest form calls for peace of mind and enjoyment and happiness which come only to the man who has found the work that he likes best.

Once I get on a puzzle, I can’t get off.

It’s a curse. I ask God to take this away from me all the time. I do not like being an artist.

When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I’m only really alive when I’m writing.

The true artist is not proud: he unfortunately sees that art has no limits; he feels darkly how far he is from the goal, and though he may be admired by others, he is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun.

Let the future tell the truth, and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments. The present is theirs; the future, for which I have really worked, is mine.

Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job, I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: ‚Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don’t you realize that?‘ They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn’t want to enter their minds.

I love food.

A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.

Yes, we’ve still got more work to do. More work to do for every American still in need of a good job or a raise, paid leave or a decent retirement; for every child who needs a sturdier ladder out of poverty or a world-class education; for everyone who has not yet felt the progress of these past seven and a half years.

I knew I’d be in the UFC since I started my career.

I have learned, in my life and work as a sportswriter, that big-time Sports and big-time Politics are not so far apart in America. They are both a means to the same end, which is victory… And why not? Victory is good for you, and don’t let anybody tell you different.

At times in my life the only place I have been happy is when I am on stage.

I can get where some scientists would say comedians are crazy. What you have to understand: A lot of comedians are dealing with a dark passion. A lot of these are guys coming from a tumultuous life, including myself. Some people need outlets, a way to express yourself.

Playing basketball all my life, I’ve collected a lot of different basketball shoes. It’s pretty much all I wear.

I think it’s important as an artist to never forget where you’re from.

There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.

I’m a working-class person, working with class.

All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.

My experience has been that work is almost the best way to pull oneself out of the depths.

The thing about being an artist today is you get to develop right in front of people’s eyes before you even put out an album.

I grew up thinking that a research scientist was a natural thing to be.

The miracle is not that we do this work, but that we are happy to do it.

In my studio, it is unkempt and unattractive. Once I’m in my work, I don’t notice where I am.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Work is the curse of the drinking classes.

But I think there are a set of experiences that turn a potential writer into a working writer, and then there are places in your life were you start to recognize what you want to do.

To be honest with you, when I got into this I never thought about reviews. I never thought about what people would say about me. I was just a young guy who was excited to become a comedian and an actor and I just wanted to get to do what I got to do.

Before I became a chief minister, I never thought that one day I’d be the chief minister.

I didn’t die young. So I am very lucky. There are other artists and people that didn’t survive certain things… people can imagine that I did the most dangerous, and I did the worst… for many reasons, I shouldn’t be here.

What I cry out for, like every being, with my whole life and all my earthly passion, is something very different from an equal to cherish: it is a God to adore.

Because my career is so important, I think I make a lot of – I wouldn’t call them sacrifices, but just concessions for my job. I love what I do, and I want to do it for a long time.

It’s very fun to be the hunter of the sounds. The hunter of the right energy. And it’s not really about if every sound is correct; it’s more the energy – if it hits you in some way, it doesn’t really matter to me if it’s not perfect. I’m still very excited while hunting for songs.

There is no scarcity of opportunity to make a living at what you love; there’s only scarcity of resolve to make it happen.

That’s when it becomes a business. When you’ve been public a long time, when it’s a career. You do certain films, you sell them.

Racing, competing, it’s in my blood. It’s part of me, it’s part of my life; I have been doing it all my life and it stands out above everything else.

The best football is always about expression of emotion. Always.

Honestly, I never really put the mic down.

For, verily, great love springs from great knowledge of the beloved object, and if you little know it, you will be able to love it only little or not at all.

Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure – that of being Salvador Dali.

Music helps me tell my story. That’s where I can really be heard. But there’s so much focus on the things that aren’t music.

Disneyland is a work of love. We didn’t go into Disneyland just with the idea of making money.

Of course, ‚I Will Always Love You‘ is the biggest song so far in my career. I’m famous for several, but that one has been recorded by more people and made me more money, I think, than all of them. But that song did come from a true and deep place in my heart.

I like having my hands in the clay. I like the movie-making process.

I probably hold the distinction of being one movie star who, by all laws of logic, should never have made it. At each stage of my career, I lacked the experience.

Those who cannot work with their hearts achieve but a hollow, half-hearted success that breeds bitterness all around.

Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable.

Love is the answer to everything. It’s the only reason to do anything. If you don’t write stories you love, you’ll never make it. If you don’t write stories that other people love, you’ll never make it.