As a kid, I’d go into the bathroom when I was having a tantrum. I’d be in the bathroom crying, studying myself in the mirror. I was preparing for future roles.

I went to a public school through sixth grade, and being good at tests wasn’t cool.

I think I could go away tomorrow. I’ve already accomplished something. It’s such a selfish business that sometimes I get sick of myself.

Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.

‚Trilogy‘ was more of a claustrophobic body of work. Before it was released, I hadn’t left my city for 21 years, and I had never been on a plane, not once. I spent my entire life on one setting; that’s probably why pieces of the album feel like one long track, because that’s what my life felt like. It felt like one long song.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul.

I always had a sense of discipline in me. However, there was a time when I couldn’t divide my time properly between off-field things and on-field assignments. The focus would be missing at times, and that would affect my preparation for matches. I managed to change that.

My life has been one great big joke, a dance that’s walked a song that’s spoke, I laugh so hard I almost choke when I think about myself.

What I have in common with the character in ‚Truman‘ is this incredible need to please people. 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.

When I’m a director, I look at myself the actor as a completely different person. It’s somebody else up there, an actor playing a role. I keep myself out of it.

You know, most people really don’t know me.

I like to take every day just searching my own heart, making sure that I’m on course, and I’m doing what God wants me to do. I’m real good with not looking to the critics and looking straight ahead.

I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

I try to prepare for everything beyond the extent of preparation.

Faith never makes a confession.

I am always wary of decisions made hastily. I am always wary of the first decision, that is, the first thing that comes to my mind if I have to make a decision. This is usually the wrong thing. I have to wait and assess, looking deep into myself, taking the necessary time.

Nobody can give you wiser advice than yourself.

Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.

A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?

All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.

I’m so nervous. I’ve always been nervous, ever since I was a kid.

Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond.

Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.

I think, for years, people have been pushed down by religion, and I don’t say that disrespectfully, but they’ve been shown a God that you can’t measure up to.

Especially for those of us who lived in single cells, you had the time to sit down and think, and we discovered that sitting down just to think is one of the best ways of keeping yourself fresh and able, to be able to address the problems facing you, and you had the opportunity, also, of examining your past.

Analysis is like a lobotomy. Who wants to have all their edges shaved off?

Suppose you could gain everything in the whole world, and lost your soul. Was it worth it?

I don’t think that much about my relationship with my mother and what it did to me. I sometimes feel terrible regret about her, what her life must have been like. Often, when I’m enjoying something, I think of how meager her rewards were and how much courage, in a way, she needed to go on living.

Mostly, my flying has been solo, but the preparation for it wasn’t. Without my husband’s help and encouragement, I could not have attempted what I have. Ours has been a contented and reasonable partnership, he with his solo jobs and I with mine. But always with work and play together, conducted under a satisfactory system of dual control.

I’m sure like everyone else I’m not always the happiest if I don’t do a good job in quali or the race or whatever, so I think beating myself up sometimes makes me work harder.

I had the most magical childhood, running free and going anywhere I wanted to in my head.

I need to keep working on myself for a while.

I am grateful to be a woman. I must have done something great in another life.

We are rarely proud when we are alone.

I’ve always felt heroic about my life… As a child, I remember little girls in the playground moaning about how boys could do more than they could. I didn’t think that was the case at all. My parents didn’t treat me as a girl.

It took me 40 years to write my first book. When I was a child, I was encouraged to go to school. I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death.

What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself.

I grew up listening to the Police, I grew up performing in bars, singing Police songs.

If evil be spoken of you and it be true, correct yourself, if it be a lie, laugh at it.

To the dumb question, ‚Why me?‘ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, ‚Why not?‘

The child in you, like all children, loves to laugh, to be around people who can laugh at themselves and life. Children instinctively know that the more laughter we have in our lives, the better.

It is all fiction, only autobiographical in the sense it is about a small town. None of the incidents in the book ever happened to me as a child. I didn’t have an eventful childhood.

Many children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary languages. I have been at it since I could write.

I spend a lot of time balancing between faith and disbelief.

Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‚But how can it be like that?‘ because you will get ‚down the drain,‘ into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

If you’re not ready for everything, you’re not ready for anything.

I was reared in the church, in the Presbyterian Church.

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.

To solve any problem, here are three questions to ask yourself: First, what could I do? Second, what could I read? And third, who could I ask?

It definitely has learning a lesson about the way you’re living your life. I wouldn’t compare our movie to that, but it has a structure where it’s about a man who doesn’t appreciate all that he has and finds out at the end that life has been great and he has to enjoy that.

We have to confront ourselves. Do we like what we see in the mirror? And, according to our light, according to our understanding, according to our courage, we will have to say yea or nay – and rise!

Childhood is the sleep of reason.

I talk about myself in the third person all the time. I don’t live my life in the way someone like you does. I live my life completely serving only my work and my fans.

All through my writing life, I’ve had this impulse to write autobiographical works.

Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can’t expect an angel to look out.

Seeing myself on the screen makes me cringe. I understand that I am that way – pouty.

People have different emotional levels. Especially when you’re young.

Sometimes when you make a film you can go away for three months and then come back and live your life. But this struck a much deeper chord. I don’t have the ability yet to speak about it in an objective.

I used to worry about every little thing, trying to figure out every problem. Well, I realize now how foolish that was. I was no more in control of my life than the man on the moon.

Bad seed is a robbery of the worst kind: for your pocket-book not only suffers by it, but your preparations are lost and a season passes away unimproved.