Sometimes I’ve been to a party where no one spoke to me for a whole evening. The men, frightened by their wives or sweeties, would give me a wide berth. And the ladies would gang up in a corner to discuss my dangerous character.

Never be the only one, except, possibly, in your own home.

It’s tough to negotiate from a position of weakness.

I do love email. Wherever possible I try to communicate asynchronously. I’m really good at email.

Acquaintances we meet, enjoy, and can easily leave behind; but friendship grows deep roots.

I am not very good with relationships. With anyone. I can’t be locked up with anyone for too long.

Love sought is good, but given unsought, is better.

I’m not really good at fun-to-know, human interest stuff. We’re not ‚celebrities‘, whose life itself is a performance. Good or bad or ugly, we are our words. They’re what people meet.

One might say that our words are a movie screen that reveals what we have been thinking and the attitudes we have.

We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal.

When it comes to gossip, I have to readily admit men are as guilty as women.

I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours.

It’s annoying, but justice and equality are mates. Aren’t they? Justice always wants to hang out with equality. And equality is a real pain.

To be admitted to Nature’s hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.

I once did a three-hour interview with Radio Oxford only to be told the microphone hadn’t picked me up.

Don’t believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.

Put it this way: If I asked, ‚How’s business?‘ and you say, ‚Boomin‘ or ‚Amazing,‘ I already know the answer.

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.

Advertising works most effectively when it’s in line with what people are already trying to do. And people are trying to communicate in a certain way on Facebook – they share information with their friends, they learn about what their friends are doing – so there’s really a whole new opportunity for a new type of advertising model within that.

I like someone who is a little crazy but coming from a good place. I think scars are sexy because it means you made a mistake that led to a mess.

What the heck is true love? I remember feeling, back when I was 12 and ‚going‘ with this girl, ‚Is this true love?‘

Generally speaking, men are held in great esteem in all parts of the world, so why shouldn’t women have their share? Soldiers and war heroes are honored and commemorated, explorers are granted immortal fame, martyrs are revered, but how many people look upon women too as soldiers?

There is no waste of time in life like that of making explanations.

Every utopia – let’s just stick with the literary ones – faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don’t fit in?

If you want a love message to be heard, it has got to be sent out. To keep a lamp burning, we have to keep putting oil in it.

The correlative to loving our neighbors as ourselves is hating ourselves as we hate our neighbors.

Doing Saturday Night Live definitely affects my relationship with my girlfriend and with my family, because you feel so much pressure to do well that night. But I think everyone’s grown to accept that and so they give me my space at the show.

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people’s throats – and one always secretes too much jelly.

I am not going to be a mouthpiece for language that I detest.

Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to trust your team. It’s a lesson I’ve had to relearn quite a few times.

If I have something to say, I want it to be meaningful.

The Tao teaches us not to intervene and interfere. The things we love we have to learn to leave alone. And the people we love we have to learn to let them be.

It destroys one’s nerves to be amiable every day to the same human being.

Our heritage and ideals, our code and standards – the things we live by and teach our children – are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings.

What makes us human, I think, is an ability to ask questions, a consequence of our sophisticated spoken language.

The best way to resolve any problem in the human world is for all sides to sit down and talk.

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

It’s important to love in hip hop.

Every once in a while I get the highly inappropriate proposal which is like, ‚Wow, Really! You don’t even know me and I don’t know you at all, and you want that to happen? Tonight? Ok, I get off work at 7.30.‘

Repartee is something we think of twenty-four hours too late.

I may neither choose who I would, nor refuse who I dislike; so is the will of a living daughter curbed by the will of a dead father.

I hold a lot of things in. I’m always making sure everybody is okay. I usually don’t rage; I usually don’t curse. So for me, it’s a great thing to be able to scream and say whatever I want.

Where there is shouting, there is no true knowledge.

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.

When you’re traveling constantly, every day you become inspired, and it shows in my work, sonically, lyrically, visually. Conversations with women with different accents and stories told in those accents. I like to create characters based on different people I’ve met, and relationships. I like to tell stories loosely based on real-life events.

Funny is the world I live in. You’re funny, I’m interested. You’re not funny, I’m not interested.

Love is the flower you’ve got to let grow.

Clean fighting solves everything. It ends all bad blood and any ill feelings people have. That’s my thoughts.

I like to speak on matters which matter to human beings, and almost everything matters to human beings.

Smiles are the language of love.

It’s a funny thing that when a man hasn’t anything on earth to worry about, he goes off and gets married.

We must be our own before we can be another’s.

Why are women… so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.

Marriage has no guarantees. If that’s what you’re looking for, go live with a car battery.

She had lost the art of conversation but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.

Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.

Remember that children, marriages, and flower gardens reflect the kind of care they get.

Extremely religious, legalistic people have a criticism or judgment about everyone and everything. They just have a way of bringing people down with what they say.

Fear not those who argue but those who dodge.

Words can be said in bitterness and anger, and often there seems to be an element of truth in the nastiness. And words don’t go away, they just echo around.