Autobiography is awfully seductive; it’s wonderful. Once I got into it, I realized I was following a tradition established by Frederick Douglass – the slave narrative – speaking in the first-person singular, talking about the first-person plural, always saying ‚I,‘ meaning ‚we.‘

I’ve been known to have a good step or two. I’m half Samoan, you know, and part of our culture is singing and dancing daily.

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts – the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.

Some believe all that parents, tutors, and kindred believe. They take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them.

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.

I truly believe the things Notre Dame stands for.

Many Tibetans sacrifice their lives.

Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her work of fiction.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

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.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

When I went back to England after a year away, the country seemed stuck, dozing in a fairy tale, stifled by the weight of tradition.

I don’t want to write an autobiography because I would become public property with no privacy left.

Food is everything we are. It’s an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It’s inseparable from those from the get-go.

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

You’re never going to kill storytelling, because it’s built into the human plan. We come with it.

Puerto Rico’s relationship with music is everything. It’s an island full of talent and if you grow up there, you grow up living and breathing music.

Thought can be so seductive and hypnotic that it absorbs your attention totally, so you become your thoughts.

I have spent every New Year’s Eve since 1992 in Lourdes. I spend the hour of my birth every year in the grotto. It’s a place with meaning for me.

I’m the proof – you can’t throw away tradition.

I felt we must separate political responsibility. The Dalai Lama should not carry that burden. So that is my selfish reason – to protect the old Dalai Lama tradition. It is safer without political involvement.

Tradition is the illusion of permanence.

Once you get a spice in your home, you have it forever. Women never throw out spices. The Egyptians were buried with their spices. I know which one I’m taking with me when I go.

It is the duty of every thoughtful Indian not to marry. In case he is helpless in regard to marriage, he should abstain from sexual intercourse with his wife.

The colored folks been singing it and playing it just like I’m doin‘ now, man, for more years than I know. I got it from them.

I used to carry my father’s Bible and put it on the pulpit so he could preach.

All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.

I’m looking for backing for an unauthorized auto-biography that I am writing. Hopefully, this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I will play everybody.

In this constant battle which we call living, we try to set a code of conduct according to the society in which we are brought up, whether it be a Communist society or a so-called free society; we accept a standard of behaviour as part of our tradition as Hindus or Muslims or Christians or whatever we happen to be.

I’m writing an unauthorized autobiography.

Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.

Fishing is much more than fish. It is the great occasion when we may return to the fine simplicity of our forefathers.

All great peoples are conservative.

Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.

Get off your horse and drink your milk.

I hate the rock music tradition. I can’t bear it!

A lot of churches have not moved with the times.

I don’t travel with them, but they can’t be missing in my home. There have to always be dominoes… I used to play with my family – dad, my grandpa, my uncles.

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.

My roots are in Paris, and I will not pull them up.

Don’t bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.

Doubt in my tradition is something that is very helpful. Because of doubt, you can thirst more and you will get a higher kind of proof.

I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.

My parents had us in church every Sunday, every Wednesday. It was more of a tradition at that point; I didn’t have a personal relationship with the Lord until I went to the altar call one Sunday, and the youth pastor told us to make a decision for ourselves.

In our home there was always prayer – aloud, proud and unapologetic.

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

When you learn about the teaching and the practice of another tradition, you always have a chance to understand your own teaching and practice.

For 20 years, Simon & Schuster asked me, ‚Why don’t you write your autobiography?‘

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.

Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.

I was baptized by my father when I was 4 years old.

The tradition of the South is not urban… I think we are a region of storytellers, naturally, just from our tribal instincts. We did not have the pleasures of the theater or the dance, motion pictures when they came along. We simply entertain each other by talking.

Few men would dare to read their own autobiography if all their deeds were recorded in it; few can look back upon their entire career without a blush.

Becoming a ‚Sir‘ is slightly uncomfortable at first, although it is a considerable honor. It is amazing how quickly you become accustomed to it.

My grandmother took me to church on Sunday all day long, every Sunday into the night. Then Monday evening was the missionary meeting. Tuesday evening was usher board meeting. Wednesday evening was prayer meeting. Thursday evening was visit the sick. Friday evening was choir practice. I mean, and at all those gatherings, we sang.

Tea to the English is really a picnic indoors.

Our need for certainty in an endeavor as uncertain as raising children makes explicit ‚how-to-parent‘ strategies both seductive and dangerous.

In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion-, and even nation-centred cultures.

Part of my ancestry is Cherokee. And in that tradition, you become an adult when you’re 52.

I’m working on my life story. I’m not decided if it’s going to be a musical or a movie with music in it.