I’m addicted to placebos.

Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.

A person’s fears are lighter when the danger is at hand.

I know that I’m not the easiest person to live with. The challenge I put on myself is so great that the person I live with feels himself challenged. I bring a lot to bear, and I don’t know how not to.

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.

Somehow, we have come to the erroneous belief that we are all but flesh, blood, and bones, and that’s all. So we direct our values to material things.

I’m almost like three people. There’s me the, Dolly, the person. There’s me, the star. And then there’s me, the manager.

It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence.

There is no austerity equal to a balanced mind, and there is no happiness equal to contentment; there is no disease like covetousness, and no virtue like mercy.

The question of whether or not there is a God or truth or reality or whatever you like to call it, can never be answered by books, by priests, philosopher’s or saviours. Nobody and nothing can answer the question but you yourself, and that is why you must know yourself – Immaturity lies only in total ignorance of self.

I am whatever you say I am; if I wasn’t, then why would you say I am.

The people who truly know me know what I’m like. There have been people who try to say things that aren’t fair, and I check them. And then they don’t like me because I checked them.

Take me, I am the drug; take me, I am hallucinogenic.

Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.

Mirth is like a flash of lightning, that breaks through a gloom of clouds, and glitters for a moment; cheerfulness keeps up a kind of daylight in the mind, and fills it with a steady and perpetual serenity.

Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.

I feel like I want to take care of everyone and I also feel this terrible guilt if I am unable to. And I have felt this way ever since all this success started.

We judge people in areas where we’re vulnerable to shame, especially picking folks who are doing worse than we’re doing.

People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.

The thing about the truth is, not a lot of people can handle it.

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

I think I lived those years very impersonally. It was almost as though I had erected someone outside myself who was the president’s wife. I was lost somewhere deep down inside myself. That is the way I felt and worked until I left the White House.

The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.

Exercise is really important to me – it’s therapeutic. So if I’m ever feeling tense or stressed or like I’m about to have a meltdown, I’ll put on my iPod and head to the gym or out on a bike ride along Lake Michigan with the girls.

Basically you have to suppress your own ambitions in order to be who you need to be.

If I am walking with two other men, each of them will serve as my teacher. I will pick out the good points of the one and imitate them, and the bad points of the other and correct them in myself.

Mothers and daughters generally have fairly complex relationships, and ours was made much more so by Mother’s illness. She had Parkinson’s disease, which was not diagnosed for a long time… All that made me very self-protective, because for one thing, I didn’t want to get trapped.

I am trying to find myself. Sometimes that’s not easy.

If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they’re real for you whether they’re real or not.

What a terrible thing to have lost one’s mind. Or not to have a mind at all. How true that is.

I’m not a god – I do bad things.

People just overshoot trying to find God. They’re going outside and trying everything. They don’t realize that it’s right inside themselves.

We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man’s features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.

Just because I managed to do a little something, I don’t want anyone back home to think I got the big head.

It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.

I don’t digest things with my mind.

People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of them.

Cultivation to the mind is as necessary as food to the body.

When I was 11 I became very depressed. It had a lot to do with the climate and ecological crisis. I thought everything was just so wrong and nothing was happening and there’s no point in anything.

There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.

The self is hateful.

I don’t have much positive to say about motor neuron disease, but it taught me not to pity myself because others were worse off, and to get on with what I still could do. I’m happier now than before I developed the condition.

We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found, and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

I’m crazy, but I’m not too crazy.

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.

Fear is the thought of admitted inferiority.

I hear my friends and my mom tell me I’m special, but honestly, I still don’t get it.

The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.

The man never feels the want of what it never occurs to him to ask for.

I’m very secure about my talents and about who I am.

Men must know their limitations.

I think life is a matter of choices and that wherever we are, good or bad, is because of choices we make.

Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.

Eventually you get to this point where you understand what you want to do and get across and sound like.

I’m confident in who I am. I’ve come to a place in my life where I’ve accepted things that are me, as opposed to feeling pressure to explain myself to people around me. That’s just the way I’ve always tried to be. It didn’t change when I became a star.

One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.

Love is a state of Being. Your love is not outside; it is deep within you. You can never lose it, and it cannot leave you. It is not dependent on some other body, some external form.

When you stop caring what people think, you lose your capacity for connection. When you’re defined by it, you lose our capacity for vulnerability.

Men take only their needs into consideration – never their abilities.