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

Anger is wonderful. It keeps you going. I’m angry about bankers. About the government.

There are folks who now know black families – like the Johnsons on ‚Black-ish‘ or the folks on ‚Modern Family.‘ They become part of who you are. You share their pains. You understand their fears. They make you laugh, and they change how you see the world.

I don’t know, I feel desperate when I sing. And I look desperate – it feels like I’m singing for my life, which makes me twitch, if that makes sense.

Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind.

The spirit desires to remain with its body, because, without the organic instruments of that body, it can neither act, nor feel anything.

You have to steal a lot. You have to have a criminal mentality to be a film director.

Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.

Life, an age to the miserable, and a moment to the happy.

When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself.

Forty is the old age of youth, fifty is the youth of old age.

The two things in the world we all share in this world are laughter and pain. We’ve all got problems. The levels of those problems vary, but we’ve all got problems. When you can take things that are painful and make them funny, that’s a gift – to you and your audience.

People tend to play in their comfort zone, so the best things are achieved in a state of surprise, actually.

Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.

For me, often, there’s such a cloud of melancholia about knowing I’m going to have to leave my daughter on her own. I don’t know what age that is going to be, thank God. It just doubles me up in grief.

Life is so, so short. Bible says it’s like a vapor.

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 fall in love every day. Not with people but with situations.

The universe is wider than our views of it.

For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.

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

An onion can make people cry but there’s never been a vegetable that can make people laugh.

I’m too busy acting like I’m not Naive. I’ve seen it all, I was here first.

Successful people make money. It’s not that people who make money become successful, but that successful people attract money. They bring success to what they do.

I don’t worry about stress. I create it.

I believe that when you think of the negative, and you get up discouraged – ‚There’s nothing good in my future‘ – I really believe it almost ties the hands of God. God works where there’s an attitude of faith. I believe faith is all about hope.

In this big ball of people, I’m just one grain of sand on this beach.

I don’t see how people are comfortable with seeing other people be great. You can be happy for anybody, but what is your excuse to not want to be great? These people are great because they just say, ‚I’ma do that,‘ and they do it. That’s it. There’s no scientifical process.

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

One likes people much better when they’re battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.

Everyone has been in love, at some point or another.

There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.

Few people have the imagination for reality.

I’m an emotional person.

I saw a subliminal advertising executive, but only for a second.

We awaken in others the same attitude of mind we hold toward them.

There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.

People who think too much before they act don’t act too much.

Our life is what our thoughts make it.

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.

People’s minds are changed through observation and not through argument.

I have found out in later years that we were very poor, but the glory of America is that we didn’t know it then.

When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.

Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors.

As social animals, we are extremely susceptible to the moods of other people. This gives us the power to subtly infuse into people the appropriate mood for influencing them.

We dissect failure a lot more than we dissect success.

Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.

The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.

It is a big temptation to me, when I create a character for a novel, to say that he is what he is because of faulty wiring, or because of microscopic amounts of chemicals which he ate or failed to eat on that particular day.

Old men are dangerous: it doesn’t matter to them what is going to happen to the world.

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.

Life must be lived as play.

I’m not a regrets-type person.

When I was 18, I thought that, to be a romantic, you couldn’t live past 30.

While victimhood in America is exalted, I don’t think our veterans should join those ranks.

A lot of people are bored of all the political correctness.

It’s the repetition of affirmations that leads to belief. And once that belief becomes a deep conviction, things begin to happen.

You know when you’re young and you see a play in high school, and the guys all have gray in their hair and they’re trying to be old men and they have no idea what that’s like? It’s just that stupid the other way around.

There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness.

If you get to my age in life and nobody thinks well of you, I don’t care how big your bank account is, your life is a disaster.

Sometimes, I want to talk on a song and be angry, because I am angry. Then there’s always a part of me that remembers that this record lives past my being angry, and so do I really want to be angry about that? Is that feeling going to have longevity?