As human beings, we are all not conducting just one narrative but many narratives all at the same time.

A lot of people have it a lot worse than you do.

I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.

There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous.

If I’m gonna tell a real story, I’m gonna start with my name.

I never saw any of my dad’s stories. My mother said he had piles and piles of manuscripts.

The things I talk about and explain couldn’t happen – yet, they don’t seem impossible – you could say I talk about the world in an abstract perspective. But then, the world is basically insane – and it’s trying to pass itself off as being a sane place. I show it for what it is.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.

I have suffered most of the things I write about – or my friends have.

My passion is bringing storylines around and constructing a full body of work rather than just a 16-bar verse.

This is not a bad life.

If you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

I’ll tell you one thing, since I’m married, single people look absolutely ridiculous to me.

I don’t pretend to understand the Universe – it’s a great deal bigger than I am.

We know what we are, but know not what we may be.

I love Los Angeles, and it’s been very good to me, but if everyone is running around telling the stories, who’s living them? You don’t play characters that are celebrities – you play guys who know what to do when their septic tank’s blocked.

Image, lyrics, content, storytelling, cohesive body of work – that’s Prince to me.

Some formulas are too complex and I don’t want anything to do with them.

I don’t have this feeling that 70 is really old.

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them. During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: ‚I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.‘

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous.

The world is seldom what it seems; to man, who dimly sees, realities appear as dreams, and dreams realities.

Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.

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.

The time to worrying about flying is when you’re on the ground. When you’re up in the air, it’s too late. No point in worrying about it then.

I don’t have much positive to say about motor neurone disease. But it taught me not to pity myself because others were worse off, and to get on with what I could still do.

Death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there’s a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room I shall be able to see.

I was born during the war and grew up in a time of rationing. We didn’t have anything. It’s influenced the way I look at the world.

It is easy to hate and it is difficult to love. This is how the whole scheme of things works. All good things are difficult to achieve; and bad things are very easy to get.

If you don’t get out of the box you’ve been raised in, you won’t understand how much bigger the world is.

A punishment to some, to some a gift, and to many a favor.

I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

North Americans don’t understand… that our country is not just Cuba; our country is also humanity.

Comedians are sociologists. We’re pointing out stuff that the general public doesn’t even stop to think about, looking at life in slow-motion and questioning everything we see.

To see things in the seed, that is genius.

Issues are never simple. One thing I’m proud of is that very rarely will you hear me simplify the issues.

I live halfway between reality and theater at all times. And I was born this way.

In the normal flow of a conversation, our attention is divided. We hear parts of what other people are saying, in order to follow and keep the conversation going. At the same time, we’re planning what we’ll say next, some exciting story of our own.

We don’t have to let extremists define us.

Let us not forget who we are. Drug abuse is a repudiation of everything America is.

I try to look on all the great things God’s done, and not focus on the negative. It’s a perspective.

Well, Art is Art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.

To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.

Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.

You can think of the entire Internet as a place where ideas embodied in cyberspace are having a war, and it’s not much different than the war of gods in heaven, which has been taking place since there’s been human beings.

Next to the young, I suppose the very old are the most selfish.

I once wanted to prove myself by being a great actress. Now I want to prove that I’m a person. Then maybe I’ll be a great actress.

Success and failure are equally disastrous.

To kids, I’ve always been more than just some big tough black guy. I train to be tough – I box and do karate – but underneath all that toughness is a tender man.

Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.

So let’s be honest with ourselves and not take ourselves too serious, and never condemn the other fellow for doing what we are doing every day, only in a different way.

Storytelling is about two things; it’s about character and plot.

The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.

Some men see things as they are, and say why. I dream of things that never were, and say why not.