For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.

I’m totally myself.

For me, one of the toughest things about Valentine’s Day is that it gets geared up as the day to profess your love. See, T-E-S-T – that’s a bad word that doesn’t go with L-O-V-E.

The experience of pain or loss can be a formidably motivating force.

Sadly, the truth is, there aren’t many people who can be put in high positions who won’t start thinking highly of themselves.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

I don’t think I’m such an amazing person who needs to be written about.

I hope not to define myself by suffering.

I am sure there’s going to be times when I do things wrong that no one’s going to like and everyone’s going to think I’m terrible and rubbish but I know I’m going to go through those times, and it’s just about understanding that that’s going to happen.

You don’t look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.

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?

I like actors very much, but to marry one would be like marrying your brother. You look too much alike in the mirror.

I don’t know what drives me to succeed.

If you always put limit on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.

Let the refining and improving of your own life keep you so busy that you have little time to criticize others.

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.

It’s true my father abused me and didn’t love and protect me the way he should have, and at times it seemed no one would ever help me and it would never end. But God always had a plan for my life, and He has redeemed me.

The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.

Failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day.

Remorse sleeps during prosperity but awakes bitter consciousness during adversity.

I write for myself things that I’ve gone through.

Your Highest Self is not just an idea that sounds lofty and spiritual. It is a way of being. It is the very first principle that you must come to understand and embrace as you move toward attracting to you that which you want and need for this parenthesis in eternity that you know as your life.

Personally I’m always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.

Self-knowledge comes from knowing other men.

What is true belongs to me!

Most nations, as well as people are impossible only in their youth; they become incorrigible as they grow older.

Never complain. Never explain.

I knew ‚Crenshaw‘ had elevated me and distinguished me.

In a controversy the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves.

Everything you need you already have. You are complete right now, you are a whole, total person, not an apprentice person on the way to someplace else. Your completeness must be understood by you and experienced in your thoughts as your own personal reality.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.

Man has two great spiritual needs. One is for forgiveness. The other is for goodness.

When you realize who you live for, and who’s important to please, a lot of people will actually start living. I am never going to get caught up in that. I’m gonna look back on my life and say that I enjoyed it – and I lived it for me.

It’s true that I’ve never had a burning desire to rebel against my parents.

Just because something didn’t work out your way, or somebody disappointed you, that does not change who you are.

Our lives are a sum total of the choices we have made.

I mean we all need a second chance sometimes.

Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.

I think there are a number of things that you can do to encourage your kids‘ dreams, but I do believe in speaking by experience of having a lot of help along the way, stumbling in the past. We’ve all stumbled, and we certainly all deserve to get up and walk again.

I am absolutely my own biggest critic.

Always first draw fresh breath after outbursts of vanity and complacency.

The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself.

People may think I’m trying something new by telling stories, but they’re just jokes connected to give the illusion of stories. But really, I just continue using my imagination and creating. That’s what I do.

I learned to fly a few years ago in England. It’s the only place I’m completely alone – up in the air, detached from everything.

When I was writing ‚Kitchen Confidential,‘ I was in my 40s, I had never paid rent on time, I was 10 years behind on my taxes, I had never owned my own furniture or a car.

Take the complications, rules, shoulds, musts, have tos, and so on out of your life. By uncomplicating your life and removing the trivial pursuits that occupy so much of it, you open a channel for the genius within you to emerge.

All honor’s wounds are self-inflicted.

I was bullied as a boy – lots of kids are, but hopefully most of us get on with our lives and grow up.

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.

I have never smuggled anything in my life. Why, then, do I feel an uneasy sense of guilt on approaching a customs barrier?

By the time you’ve reached your sixties, you do know that one day you will die, and knowing that is at least the beginning of wisdom.

The good things of prosperity are to be wished; but the good things that belong to adversity are to be admired.

I was thinking about how people seem to read the Bible a whole lot more as they get older; then it dawned on me – they’re cramming for their final exam.

The higher we are placed, the more humbly we should walk.

I don’t believe in ‚thinking‘ old. Although I’ve transitioned through many bodies – a baby, toddler, child, teen, young adult, mid-life and older adult – my spirit is unchanged. I support my body with exercise, my mind with reading and writing, and my spirit with the knowing that I am part of the Divine source of all life.

I carry a small sheet of paper in my wallet that has written on it the names of people whose opinions of me matter. To be on that list, you have to love me for my strengths and struggles.

If your heart is a volcano, how shall you expect flowers to bloom?

Because you know when you first become famous, you start walking a little different because people are staring at you.

Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain – and most fools do.

It was high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, ‚always do what you are afraid to do.‘

For an author, the nice characters aren’t much fun. What you want are the screwed up characters. You know, the characters that are constantly wondering if what they are doing is the right thing, characters that are not only screwed up but are self-tapping screws. They’re doing it for themselves.