It’s very important to know the neighbor next door and the people down the street and the people in another race.

When you love someone, the best thing you can offer is your presence. How can you love if you are not there?

Part of our tradition as black women is that we are universalists. Black children, yellow children, red children, brown children, that is the black woman’s normal, day-to-day relationship. In my family alone, we are about four different colors.

I don’t really know that much about love, it turns out.

A friend in power is a friend lost.

Those Marriages generally abound most with Love and Constancy, that are preceded by a long Courtship.

Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.

It’s not possible to stop love.

All of us are so mixed. My great-grandfather was white.

Children are all foreigners.

Even the rich are hungry for love, for being cared for, for being wanted, for having someone to call their own.

I like working. That’s when I’m feeling my best. And the people around me know that. My wife knows that.

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?

In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it.

The essence of all religions is one. Only their approaches are different.

If you have fear, you are bound by tradition, you follow some leader or guru. When you are bound by tradition, when you are afraid of your husband or your wife, you lose your dignity as an individual human being.

Love is only one of many passions.

An association of men who will not quarrel with one another is a thing which has never yet existed, from the greatest confederacy of nations down to a town meeting or a vestry.

People hate as they love, unreasonably.

I think the perfection of love is that it’s not perfect.

The drama and the trauma of the relationship you have when you’re 16 can mirror the one you have when you’re 26. Life repeats itself.

I’m married to an Italian woman, and I used to love cooking Italian at home, because it’s one-pot cooking. But my wife does not approve of my Italian cooking.

Then, when I’m in these relationships with people who are also creative, or creative in their own way, what happens is the attraction is initially there and it’s all unicorns and rainbows. And then they hate me.

Even in this globalised world, London is still the standard for our times. The city has embraced the world’s diversity and represents the finest in human achievements.

Waking up every day and loving someone who may or may not love us back, whose safety we can’t ensure, who may stay in our lives or may leave without a moment’s notice, who may be loyal to the day they die or betray us tomorrow – that’s vulnerability.

We were never intimate mother and children while she was our mother – but… when she became our child, the affection came.

I had a lovers quarrel with the world.

My mother did not like children.

Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.

Family and friendships are two of the greatest facilitators of happiness.

Love begins at home, and it is not how much we do… but how much love we put in that action.

We can improve our relationships with others by leaps and bounds if we become encouragers instead of critics.

I’ve missed out on a lot of things, going out with friends.

If you want to know your true opinion of someone, watch the effect produced in you by the first sight of a letter from him.

The average Hollywood film star’s ambition is to be admired by an American, courted by an Italian, married to an Englishman and have a French boyfriend.

Pride is an independent, me-oriented spirit. It makes people arrogant, rude and hard to get along with. When our heart is prideful, we don’t give God the credit and we mistreat people, looking down on them and thinking we deserve what we have.

All great change in America begins at the dinner table.

Gentleness, self-sacrifice and generosity are the exclusive possession of no one race or religion.

I really thought I was on the way out. My husband Blake saved my life. Often I don’t know what I do, then the next day the memory returns. And then I am engulfed in shame.

For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?

How marriage ruins a man! It is as demoralizing as cigarettes, and far more expensive.

A man will speedily sit down and sympathize with a friend’s griefs, but if he sees him honored and esteemed, he is apt to regard him as a rival and does not so readily rejoice with him. This ought not to be; without effort, we ought to be happy in our brother’s happiness.

Men who think that a woman’s past love affairs lessen her love for them are usually stupid and weak.

Eating is so intimate. It’s very sensual. When you invite someone to sit at your table and you want to cook for them, you’re inviting a person into your life.

When you’re doing a film and the majority of the film is cast black, for me, it’s most important to get people to view those movies as just movies, as just good movies. At the end of the day, regardless of the color of the cast, we’re all doing the same thing in this business: trying to make a good film.

I’ve known and continue to know every one of these major world leaders by their first names, and I have access to them.

If you treat people right they will treat you right… ninety percent of the time.

Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver.

There isn’t anybody that looks like me without clothes on.

You can draw inspiration from anything. If you’re a good storyteller, you can take a dirty look somebody gives you, or if a guy you used to have flirtations with starts dating a new girl, or somebody you’re casually talking to says something that makes you so mad – you can create an entire scenario around that.

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

I make friends faster and easier than journalists.

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.

Right now, when we’re hearing so much disturbing and hateful rhetoric, it is so important to remember that our diversity has been – and will always be – our greatest source of strength and pride here in the United States.

I maintain that, if everyone knew what others said about him, there would not be four friends in the world.

A man has a tendency to accept you the way you are, while most women immediately start to pick flaws and want to change you.

Strength lies in differences, not in similarities.

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

Friendship often ends in love, but love in friendship – never.

There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day. That little girl was me.

When a man says he had pleasure with a woman he does not mean conversation.