All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.

Everyone knows nowadays that people ‚have complexes‘. What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us.

I work all day, do research, sketch my ideas, prepare for performances.

Meditation is not following any system; it is not constant repetition and imitation. Meditation is not concentration.

Most men are within a finger’s breadth of being mad.

It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night.

Sometimes, women in families put themselves last until it manifests itself in their own health.

A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace.

Melancholy, indeed, should be diverted by every means but drinking.

On a career level, I always advise people to look ahead and be open to changes in direction. That job that seems so good now can easily turn into a nightmare if you do not see the possible corners it can land you in.

Anger is like a storm rising up from the bottom of your consciousness. When you feel it coming, turn your focus to your breath.

If I didn’t have my films as an outlet for all the different sides of me, I would probably be locked up.

I admire people who destroy themselves.

Worry and reasoning are two of Satan’s most successful tools. He’ll get us started with one negative thought and then sit back and watch us finish ourselves off.

I don’t need therapy. I’m not going to see a therapist; comedy acts as my therapy. I put my problems out there. I talk about them. I talk about everything before anybody has a chance.

Whether for life or death, do your own work well.

As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey.

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.

Kids who have an understanding of how and why their feelings are what they are are much more likely to talk to us about what’s happening, and they have better skills to work it out.

I have a terrifying long list of fears. Literally everything – diseases, spiders… and people getting tired of me.

We had to go on and do the work of the court and we did.

I used to let other people’s struggles affect my happiness. If they weren’t happy, there was no way I was going to be happy. The opposite was also true: If I wasn’t happy, I didn’t want anyone around me to be happy.

I know from personal experience how damaging it can be to live with bitterness and unforgiveness. I like to say it’s like taking poison and hoping your enemy will die. And it really is that harmful to us to live this way.

When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

I’m not a complete psychopath. Am I partially? Sure. I’ll accept that. But I’m not a complete psychopath.

When you work you are a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music. Which of you would be a reed, dumb and silent, when all else sings together in unison?

I’m the first to admit this whole salary thing is getting out of control. In the final analysis, it’s still about the work.

People tend to dwell more on negative things than on good things. So the mind then becomes obsessed with negative things, with judgments, guilt and anxiety produced by thoughts about the future and so on.

Well, there are some things that I just can’t get out of my head, and they start to annoy me after a while. Sometimes they’re of my own creation, as well – and they’re just as annoying. It’s not only other people’s ear worms that bug me, it’s my own, as well.

I do think coaches need to get away from the game more, though. It’s good for them.

I’m going to stay active as long as I can politically, and with the Carter Center primarily, and if I’m able mentally and physically, will continue to be quite active.

Big pay and little responsibility are circumstances seldom found together.

For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?

Overnight stardom can be harmful to your mental health. Yeah. It has ruined a lot of people.

Give yourself a gift of five minutes of contemplation in awe of everything you see around you. Go outside and turn your attention to the many miracles around you. This five-minute-a-day regimen of appreciation and gratitude will help you to focus your life in awe.

The only difference between the sane and the insane is that the sane have the power to lock up the insane.

Worry is the interest paid by those who borrow trouble.

The sovereign cure for worry is prayer.

For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.

Paranoia is just another word for ignorance.

The story with anorexic girls – nobody works with anorexic girls. That has nothing to do with fashion.

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

I felt like I had a really bad case of writer’s block… Music is so therapeutic for me that if I can’t get it out, I start feeling bad about myself – a lot of self-loathing.

To live is to think.

For me, there have been times when an action movie, even a ‚Tomb Raider,‘ has helped me get out of myself and be physical again. It’s like therapy.

As for me, prizes are nothing. My prize is my work.

The answer I found is you stay away from the people who make fun of you, and you join these ad hoc groups who understand your craziness.

From infancy, I have relied on the fiercely sweet spirits of black men; and this is abundantly clear in my work.

For people who live in the suburbs and must commute long distances to work, their wealth will sink as energy prices rise.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

Even paranoids have real enemies.

I briefly did therapy, but after a while, I realised it is just like a farmer complaining about the weather. You can’t fix the weather – you just have to get on with it.

Every man who possibly can should force himself to a holiday of a full month in a year, whether he feels like taking it or not.

Worry – a God, invisible but omnipotent. It steals the bloom from the cheek and lightness from the pulse; it takes away the appetite, and turns the hair gray.

I never called my work an ‚art‘. It’s part of show business, the business of building entertainment.

After the 9/11 apocalypse happened in New York City, people, particularly New Yorkers, who breathed in the ash, or saw the results of that, have a tendency to keep seeing echoes and having flashbacks to it.

If you get an opportunity to work with David Simon, anybody with good taste would.

I guess there is nothing that will get your mind off everything like golf. I have never been depressed enough to take up the game, but they say you get so sore at yourself you forget to hate your enemies.

Well, I thought the deal was, when you went to work for the government you weren’t supposed to make money!

Whenever things go a bit sour in a job I’m doing, I always tell myself, ‚You can do better than this.‘

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.